Choose Your Own Animation Adventure!

Inspired by 80s kids TV programmes like Knightmare and The Adventure Game, we had a bit of an animated space adventure at our recent Intergalactic Animation Adventure!

The Omicron Orb in our lightspeed drive exploded leaving us stranded in space. We had to send a crack team of space adventurers down to a nearby planet to retrieve an alternate power source. Along the way some of you met with a horrible fate, being crushed to death or eaten alive by alien creatures, with only Commander Yellow surviving to save the day.

You can watch all the sections over on our Instagram, the route the audience chose on the night as well as what would have happened if they'd made all the opposite choices along the way.

Here's a few making of bits as well!

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We bought 200 little spacemen toys, then found a 3D model of an "Alien Warrior" which looked similar and recoloured it to roughly match the little toy. We've got loads of these plastic chaps left if you want an extra one to play with in the bath, pretending they're on an adventure to the bottom of the ocean.

It quickly dawned on us just how many different permutations having one of the 5 spacemen dying at each choice would result in (16 different outcomes).

To try and wrap our tiny brains around the different outcome animations and who'd be in each one, we made a big old spreadsheet.

Our first doodle showing who would perish at each stage. Almost everyone had the same chance of winning, however with 5 spacemen and 16 possible outcomes yellow had a tiny advantage.

We veeerryyy roughly storyboarded the sections so we could try and keep the shots for each section to a minimum.

Some of our very quick models chucked together as fast as we could. We leant into the slightly crappy, 80s style heavily and covered our sins with a heavy layer of VHS fuzz so we could get them out quickly (we've got a day job).

The plan was to re-use as much as possible across the sequences, so we'd render a run cycle from the side, front, top etc. and then just change the colour in After Effects for the relevant spaceman. To speed things up we rendered stills for the backgrounds and dropped the characters in.

Here's all of the animation files, 68 in total. By Chapter 4 we needed 8 different versions of each choice outcome (it seemed like a good idea at the start).