When Monster Puppet joined the team, we were in the process of converting our originally announced game THE RUN: GOT NEXT to the officially licensed game, NBA THE RUN. 

As part of the process to convert over to NBA THE RUN, our ambitions for the project grew significantly and we aligned on one main goal - be the best looking and most fun basketball game on the market. In order to deliver on that goal, we engaged with the team at Monster Puppet to help build & execute the plan. 

We aimed to create hand-crafted, curated player characters that were both performant from a technical perspective and also unique at any given level of animation. This meant that we needed to create a system where our players were constructed on one core rig / skeleton (performance) while also providing the flexibility to feature unique animation(s) for every single playable character in the game. 

Throughout the first few months, we worked hand in hand with the team at Monster Puppet to craft this plan - the MP team has been fully embedded with our core development team from Day 1, which has been key to our success. We built this plan alongside Engineers, Character Artists, Animators and Designers to ensure that we were all aligned and also confident that we would deliver a best in class system for our game. The bulk of the work came as we built the system and there was a lot of iteration. When you have a game that features characters from 5'7" to 7'7" all with the ability to technically run on 1 rig / skeleton while also featuring unique animations for any given move / moveset, there's quite a bit of work involved. 

We've been working together for well over a year now and the team at Monster Puppet truly feel part of our core development team - they have worked with us from concept through to completion (and all of the iteration in between). When we ran into challenges, we figured them out together. When we had new design requests (such as a scalable rig for facial animations to bring more life to our characters), we put our heads together and figured it out. I'm proud to say that throughout this engagement, we have not only found a long-standing partner w/ Monster Puppet, we have found a team who fundamentally helped us achieve our goal of being the best looking and most fun basketball game on the market. 

The Monster Puppet Team have been nothing short of phenomenal partners for us here at Play by Play Studios and we look forward to a bright future ahead, together. We Got Next. 

Scott Probst, CEO
Play by Play Studios