Case study · Game prototype
KAGE
Two bodies, one player. Swap between a shinobi who climbs and a samurai who fights, and remember that the body you leave behind can still get caught.
The brief
Games take a long time to build and only a short time to turn out not to be fun. We wanted to know fast whether the swap idea holds up.
The target was a playable vertical slice, with real guard AI, traversal and a finished art direction, in days rather than months.
What we built
- Swap between two bodies
- Climb, pull up and vault on one key
- Guards that see, suspect and raise the alarm
- An ink-wash look in one shader
Hold Q and the camera glides to the other body. The one you left keeps its place in the world, and the guards can find it.
Guards patrol with a vision cone that walls block, fill a suspicion meter, then chase and search. Start a chase and every guard within 25 metres comes looking.
A full-screen shader draws ink outlines from depth and normals, reduces colour to paper and ink tones, and fades the distance into paper. The whole compound, its halls, lanterns and torii are generated from data. The characters and animations are open-licence assets, retargeted and fixed by measurement.
Every feature had an acceptance checklist before it was built, and scripted play tests that report numbers, not impressions.
Under the hood
By the numbers
- 30 h From empty project to playable slice
- 30 Custom editor tools
- 3.9 ms Ink-wash pass per frame
Got something
worth building?
Rough is fine. Send us the idea before it is tidy, while there is still room to make it stranger.
- A reply within two working days
- A plan and a quote. No pitch deck
- A straight no if the budget and the idea do not match