Project Overview
Juvenate is a hybrid 2.5D and 3D action-adventure game where you play as Juvenate, a warrior who channels his power to boost either movement or combat abilities.
By enhancing his lower body, Juvenate gains increased traversal skills to navigate challenging environments, while boosting his upper body grants him the strength to overpower enemies. His ultimate goal is to battle through a hostile realm, confront Death itself, and spark a new cycle of reincarnation.
Juvenate Trailer as of 5/15/2025. I will be posting our final trailer on 5/30 at the end of the quarter.
My Role on the Project
As the technical animation lead, I designed and implemented our entire animation pipeline, collaborated with our two-person animation team to define requirements and devise creative solutions for delivering all character animations despite limited resources, and programmed the majority of the character movement and various other gameplay systems across the project.
Before the project began, I reviewed our character lineup and created an animation spreadsheet to catalog and retarget as many existing animations as possible. I also scoped tasks carefully for our volunteer animators so they understood their assignments without exceeding a manageable workload.
Original Enemy Concepts by Kat Farley
Example Character Animation Spreadsheet
Since I joined the project just before development began, I helped establish each character’s animation scope. As the only team member focused on animation, I translated our lead’s notes and requests into clear, actionable requirements.
I also evaluated initial concept designs for our protagonist’s upper-body enhancement, advised on the most animation-friendly options, and guided the team to select the devil variant.
Character Rigging
Originally, my primary responsibilities on the project were programming, implementing animations, and managing our team of two riggers and two animators. Right before development began, however, both riggers informed us they would be too busy to contribute, which left a critical gap in our pipeline.
To address this, I stepped up and learned character rigging from scratch. I followed Jeremy Ernst’s Unreal Engine rigging tutorial series from Riot Games and applied those techniques to build custom rigs for every character in the game, except for Osial, our three-armed boss, whose rig had been created by Max Wu before I joined the project.
https://www.youtube.com/@jeremyernst/videos
Below are some breakdowns on characters I have rigged and integrated into the game. I will be adding more soon as I am working on polishing these rigs up as many of them were made in extreme crunch and as of 5/18/2025 when I am writing this, the project is still in development.
Juvenate Rig
Minotaur King Rig
Learning how to Animate
My next challenge was that neither animator had prior experience with Unreal Engine’s animation tools, yet our characters were rigged in Unreal. To address this, I organized targeted training sessions on Unreal’s animation workflows before I began rigging.
This approach had been agreed upon in advance, as they were keen to expand their skill set and become more versatile.
Once I completed the character’s rig, I immediately began testing the setup by creating animations and teaching myself keyframe techniques. I took it upon myself to learn Unreal Engine’s animation tools not only to advance my own skills but also to gain hands-on experience working with our animators and onboarding them onto the new software. Before this project, my keyframing background was limited to a simple squash-and-stretch bouncing ball, so producing my first full-character animations marked a major milestone in mastering the animation workflow.
After producing those initial animations, I held a couple of work sessions with our animators to teach them everything I had learned. Their understanding of Unreal’s animation tools grew quickly, and before long they were producing impressive results that integrated seamlessly into our pipeline.
Attack 1/4 for Juvenate's Enhanced Attack.
This was one of my first ever animations, and it taught me so much about all of the tools unreal has to offer for animation.
I started by creating a four-hit attack cycle for Juvenate’s upper-body enhanced form to get familiar with the tools and set up the arm rig with real-time retargeting so the enhanced limbs follow his real arms seamlessly without additional animation data.
Empowering Animators
After sharing my Unreal Engine animation workflow with our animators, they soon began producing impressive animations. It took a brief adjustment period, but as my rigs improved, their speed and quality increased dramatically.
Minotaur Walk Cycle WIP by Michelle Kim
Minotaur Enemy Aggro by Austin Bookman
Bull Club Attack by Michelle Kim
Directional Flight Blendspace WIP made in collaboration with Michelle Kim
By the end of the month, I’ll have much more to show, as all of my rigs will be fully polished and all animations should be properly implemented in game.
Entelechy Game Animation Submission
Each year, SCAD hosts the Entelechy competition for game students. For this quarter, I assembled a demo reel showcasing my animation and technical animation work on our project, with an emphasis on performance, timing, and rigging rather than implementation details. I’m honored to be a finalist in the Game Animation category and am looking forward to the final results.