Real Stories Inspire

Project Context

Real Stories Inspire was a multi-release content project for Saudi Aramco where the main engineering problem was structure: each story needed its own scenes, animation and navigation, but the underlying system had to stay reusable.

Goodboy produced a handful of the stories, while remaining stories were intended to be handled by a third-party team. That meant the code could not rely on one-off scene scripts that only the original developers understood.

The team consisted of four key people: a designer, two developers and a producer. I was the lead developer across multiple development cycles, one per story, and focused on keeping the content model, animation behaviour and scene structure reusable between releases.

The original interactive experience is no longer represented online in the same form, as the currently available version appears to have moved toward video-based presentation.

Stories

• The Man Who Sowed Tomorrow
• The Seamstress Who Sewed the Future
• The Writer Who Caught the Clouds

Reusable Story Structure

Shared behaviour could not be hidden inside a single hard-coded scene. Navigation, scene setup, parallax, reveal transitions and asset handling all needed to be reusable across stories.

That mattered because the code had to be understandable to people outside the original team. A third party needed to continue producing stories without reverse-engineering every decision from the first release.

Marrying 3D And 2D

Scenes reacted to mouse and touch position by moving and rotating in a way that created depth and parallax.

Under the hood, each scene was represented as a 3D game object containing other 3D objects. The positioning of 2D elements, including Spine animations and PNG assets, was then mapped into that scene structure. The depth position of each object affected the amount of parallax applied, producing a richer layered presentation while still using 2D artwork.

Artist-Curated Scene Reveal

Manually authored brush-stroke transitions did not produce the desired visual result, so I added debug tooling that allowed the project to create a canvas for drawing with mouse input.

That tool made it possible to record and play back artist-created brush strokes. The resulting transition data was stored in JSON and used in the production build, with configurable options such as step, speed, alpha and texture.