That’s Using Your Head

The developers of Car Quest used Apple ARKit Face Tracking to create over 900 unique animations for the game’s mentor and guide, a holographic floating head named Lord Blockstar.

In Car Quest players drive through a broken world on a journey of discovery and adventure. But they aren’t alone, guiding them on their travels is a holographic head, Lord Blockstar. As the main character players interact with, the challenge for Car Quest’s developers was how to give this floating head personality?

This challenge was tailor made for Ezone.com, a development team of two brothers from Perth, Jamie and Simon Edis, who have been making indie games together since 1994. Over the years they have consistently applied the same two core principles when making games: creativity and technology. Providing the creative spark is Jamie, a classically trained animator who is responsible for bringing to life Ezone.com characters like Lenny Loosejocks, Sling, Fat Boy, Garbot from Diversion and the characters in Team Awesome. On the technology side is Simon who programs the games and is always on the lookout for ‘the next big thing’.

This combination has helped Ezone become a pioneer in the ever changing indie game space. They created some of the first web browser games in the mid-90s, had apps in the Apple App Store on opening day, published the first 3D Unity game in the App Store (‘Crazy Snowboard‘), ‘Spin Sports‘ was one of the first crop of Apple TV games, and they released Mammoth Mini Golf AR the same day ARKit was available.

“Early adoption of new technology is Ezone.com’s sweet spot. Being a small two-man outfit means we can quickly incorporate the latest tools and workflows to help make better games and engaging characters.”

Simon Edis, Programmer

While working on Car Quest brothers Jamie and Simon were also developing the Augmented Reality (AR) game Mammoth Mini Golf AR which included a feature that allowed players to control an on-screen Mammoth. This got the brothers thinking: can these facial animations be recorded and played back during a game?

Simon was able to modify the code from Mammoth Mini Golf AR to create a custom app for the iPhone to capture facial animation performances. Then, with the phone and game development computer connected to the same network he used a technique employed by multiplayer games to pass the information from phone to computer in real-time.

Once the system was working it was over to Jamie Edis, the creative force behind Ezone to do all the animation performances. “Initially we were only going to animate a few sequences, but when we saw how well the system worked, and how fast we could record animations we ended up creating more than 900 for the final game.”

“Initially we were only going to animate a few sequences, but when we saw how well the system worked, and how fast we could record animations we ended up creating more than 900 for the final game.”

Jamie Edis, animator

In addition to the 3D modeling, animation and game design Jamie also created the sounds effects, original music and all the voice acting for the (spoiler alert!) various characters you encounter in Car Quest. Like an animated feature film, all the voices were recorded first and then the characters animated afterwards. Using the iPhone X and Face Tracking to capture the performance required no expensive capture equipment, no laborious keyframe animation and no post-production cleanup.

“Without the Face Tracking system we’d still be working on animations for the game.”

Simon Edis, Programmer