These folks are paid peanuts to destroy their mental health doing moderation work to train AI.

The stories were endless: “I collapsed in the office”; “I went into a severe depression”; “I had to go to hospital”; “they had no concern for our wellbeing”.

When I joined the Wanderstop team in 2019, the game was being made by a very small team. In terms of full time employees, I think I was #6. My job would be to rig, animate, and implement the animations of every character in the game. Eventually, years later, the animation team would grow to as many as four simultaneous people. But I didn't know that at the time - I simply knew that, like many previous projects, there was a lot of work to do and just one Me.

For this reason, my initial priority was on finding shortcuts. There's only one way you animate an ambitious, high-detail game like this as a single animator, and that's by finding ways to save yourself from having to do absolutely everything by hand. For this reason, I spent a lot of early Wanderstop dev setting up animation tech to automatically deal with a bunch of situations.

Let's explore some examples below the cut!

I set up a simple system here where anyone - a designer, the game director, a prop modeler - could go in and simply specify where on the item attaches to the character's palm, and a "grip style" chosen from one of about 12 basic poses that account for most ways a normal person could hold an item at their side.

its true! me - a lowly game designer without a lick of animation knowledge - was able to implement grips on a bunch of items throughout the game. Aura built a really excellent system : )

(unrelated gif of a time when I was in the middle of implementing item grabbing and horrible things happened)