Earlier this week, YouTube studio SoKrispyMedia released a multiplayer shooter with a unique style called Chalk Wars. Adapted from their viral short video series, the game’s standout feature is letting players “draw” their weapons by hand and immediately jump into combat with them.
The “Chalk Warfare” short film series, created by Sam Wickert and Eric Uys, first launched in 2012. To date, the four videos have accumulated over 350 million views on YouTube.
In this upcoming game version, players must first “draw” a gun themselves using the chalk in their hands, and it will then materialize directly into the character’s hand. Not only that, the drawing process also offers endless freedom. For example, if the player draws a “grip,” the way the character holds and fires the weapon will change; drawing a “sight” allows the player to aim more precisely through the optic, and drawing a larger “magazine” increases the amount of ammunition available.
Not only that, but this *Chalk Wars* game will also be closely tied to the team’s YouTube videos. For example, players can see series character Stuart appearing as an NPC in the tutorial stages, and the team even recorded hundreds of different voice lines for him.
“We’ve always wanted to make Chalk Wars into a game, but we knew we had to get it right. We tried a third-person perspective, and it was fun to play, but it still wasn’t good enough. At one point in development, we tried letting players pick from fixed weapon templates, but that wasn’t good enough either. So in the end, we decided to build our own, more refined recognition algorithm from scratch, one that could understand whatever the player actually drew.” — Sam Wickert
Furthermore, to showcase this technology at this year’s Unreal Fest, the SoKrispyMedia team specially built a real-time debugging view to directly show how the AI analyzes images while the player draws. According to Wickert, the machine learning model will keep improving with more real-world usage. However, the testing process for Chalk Wars before the official demonstration was actually not smooth.
Just a few days before the exhibition, the team invited a number of 18-year-old young players to come test the game, and they quickly found many bugs, including one where the character’s hands would suddenly glitch out in the middle of gameplay. To resolve this series of issues before the Unreal Fest showcase, the SoKrispyMedia team members pulled three consecutive all-nighters working frantically to fix these bugs. But Sam Wickert also emphasized that when he saw the players’ reactions to the actual gameplay reveal of Chalk Wars, all the effort was worth it.
Chalk War’s release date has not yet been announced, but players can already add the game to their Steam wishlist.
Source: KOCPC Chinese