Project
N°013
Name
PUSH — A Threads mini-game
Company
Threads
Date
2023
Role
Game Design, Animation, 3D, Video Editing & Production, Web Design & Development
Availability
Offline
About
At Threads.com we feature simple, abstract, 3D avatars built from volumetric pixels (voxels). They're used as avatars in our desktop app, they float around on our website, and "speak" in our marketing.
More than illustrations, they represent ourselves, our customers, and some aspects of pop culture. They're an important part of our brand. I saw an opportunity to build a 3D world for these voxel characters. One that could inform where these voxel characters are, and what they're doing.
So I pitched the idea of building a mini-game. The intention was for the average player to pilot one of our voxel characters in a simple scenario, driving the point of Threads home.
PUSH — A Threads mini-game
I recreated a fully animated version of Fabio's voxel avatar in Spline as the playable character for this game.
Since Super Fabio is a voxel character (normally used as an in-product avatar) he's typically seen in the product UI at 24x24 or 36x36 pixels. That's quite small. That makes him a bit smaller than an app icon. By comparison, the device outside of the app is quite large. It made perfect sense for the game world to be a large mobile phone (with a watch to keep time).
I thought it might be fun to recreate the Apple Macintosh 128K (c.1984) as a fictional machine from a distant future. Dubbed threads84 (from 2084), a thoroughly evolved version of our own company decided to use time travel to send us a delightful memo in the form of a game.
And along with this device is a fictional 23QB quantum density floppy disk — a convenient visual for us to share this game with. This scene (and several others) were modeled in Blender 3D and rendered as videos for social media marketing.
