The Artwork of Play: Karim Maaloul’s World of Interactive Marvel

Hello, I’m Karim, co-founder and Inventive Director at EPIC Company. I lead a crew of gifted designers and collaborate intently with expert builders at EPIC to craft good trying and consumer pleasant web sites.

I’m intently concerned in UX/UI design, from early prototyping to the design of full digital platforms.
I additionally dedicate a lot of my time to crafting sport ideas and 3D fashions for activation video games and immersive experiences.

By night time, you’ll typically discover me coding video games or experimenting with shaders, nonetheless chasing that spark of play and creativity that began all of it.

Highlighted initiatives

The Cursed Library

The Cursed Library is a ardour venture that blends my lifelong love for youngsters’s books, basic tales, and darkish, immersive atmospheres. I designed six unsettling worlds impressed by well-known tales, modeled completely in Blender 3D.

Powered by Three.js and customized shaders, the expertise unfolds as a journey by way of a haunted library, the place hidden portals transport guests into completely different dimensions.

Sound is on the coronary heart of the expertise. Each whisper, melody, and echo shapes the temper. The superb Steve Jones and Jules Maxwell crafted the haunting soundtracks, recorded the voices, and coded the intricate audio transitions.

Captain Goosebumps

Yearly at EPIC, we dedicate our time and experience to help a trigger that displays our values. This 12 months, we selected to boost consciousness for Reside in Coloration, a Belgian group that promotes the inclusion of refugees by way of schooling.

To take action, we created a playful net sport that includes a snowboarding goose that brings shade again to the world. Whereas the core improvement was led by my colleague Théo Gil Cerqueira, I used to be answerable for the artwork path, illustration, and shader coding of the path.

Crimson Bull Sand Scramble

Crimson Bull is a consumer we collaborate with recurrently. I’ve been concerned in a number of sport initiatives for them, however my favourite is Crimson Bull Sand Scramble, a fast-paced racing sport the place I developed a easy but environment friendly physics engine, together with the 3D modeling and gameplay design.

I labored intently with Shamil Altamirov who developed the interface, and my affiliate Thierry Michel, who coded the entire gameplay and reworked a tough prototype into an lively, adrenaline-filled expertise that completely captures the spirit of Crimson Bull.

Tiny Experiments

I’ve at all times had a comfortable spot for small-scale initiatives. I take pleasure in crafting bite-sized experiences that discover easy mechanics and strategies in playful methods. I spend loads of time experimenting on CodePen, the place I can give attention to the tiny particulars and polish each interplay.

Listed below are a couple of of these experiments.

See the Pen
Skating bunny by Karim Maaloul (@Yakudoo)
on CodePen.

Skating Bunny is a small minimalist sport I constructed as a playful reward for individuals who contact us by way of our web site. It was an ideal excuse to experiment with the body buffer method used to attract the skate marks and to craft customized shaders for the graceful, blurred ground reflections.

See the Pen
Infinite Portals by Karim Maaloul (@Yakudoo)
on CodePen.

Two worlds are interconnected, sharing the identical digital camera view however current in several spatial dimensions. This experiment is one other tackle the portal results I beforehand explored in The Cursed Library.

See the Pen
Chill the lion by Karim Maaloul (@Yakudoo)
on CodePen.

Chill the Lion was the Codepen that acquired me probably the most consideration, I made it throughout a warmth wave, and one way or the other, it went viral.

It was additionally one in all my very first experiments with Three.js, the place I constructed a lion completely out of dice primitives.

Again then, I had no 3D modeling expertise in any respect. Studying Blender 3D afterward fully reworked how I design and produce interactive characters to life.

About me

I started my profession practically 20 years in the past as a kids’s guide illustrator earlier than transitioning into net design. I then joined a number of companies as a Flash developer, creating wealthy interactive experiences. When Flash met its finish, I dove into Three.js, exploring new methods to convey interactivity to the net by way of 3D experiences and video games.

What I really like most is mixing my illustration, design, and coding abilities to craft brief, playful experiences.
I take pleasure in infusing my very own artwork path into the code and continuously studying new strategies to higher categorical my artistic imaginative and prescient.

Today, I’m most enthusiastic about Godot, an open-source, light-weight various to the massive sport engines.
I’m additionally curious to see how AI will form and develop the artistic course of.
And naturally, I’m nonetheless all in favour of Three.js, particularly TSL, a node-based shading language that simplifies the creation of shaders.

Karim and Wenzhu at work — That is me, pretending to work very exhausting with my colleague Wenzhu.

Instruments

I exploit Blender3D, Figma, Photoshop, and After Results every day to form the design of my experiences. On the coding facet, I depend on Three.js, GSAP, and vanilla JavaScript to convey my characters to life.

These days, with the rise of AI, I’ve been experimenting with ComfyUI, Midjourney, and VEO3.

Closing Ideas

In the long run, instruments are simply instruments.
I as soon as noticed a calligrapher write a stunningly lovely phrase utilizing solely his finger and a few espresso as ink. An ideal reminder that the best talent one can develop is a pointy eye and a wealthy, open-minded sense of curiosity.

Codrops illustrates this concept by exhibiting that there’s by no means a single option to obtain an impact.
Mastering a way broadens your talent set, however what actually issues is the power to forge your personal path.

Thanks for studying this highlight!