Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1516015
10 KEYFRAME A F T E R H O U R S "The interesting thing is that the mystery framing of the story also helps with the game design. They're very symbiotic… I need to tell the player this information in this order so that they understand the mystery. Not just because it's a story, but because it's a puzzle that they have to solve." A LOVE OF MYSTERIES, ANIMATION, AND FILMMAKING LED CAMERON WOODARD TO CREATE HIS OWN VIDEO GAME. Cameron Woodard is taking things slower these days—compared to last year when he was working on the second "chapter" of his video game, Occult Crime Police (OCP). "I was basically just a machine for making this game. I did my day job, and I did work on this new chapter, and that was it," says the Wild Canary Production Assistant and Story Revisionist. This isn't to say he's not excited about the third OCP chapter he's working on now. In fact, he says, he's been envisioning an investigation into "a body-snatching epidemic at the local mall" since he first got the idea for OCP more than five years ago when he was a student in animation at Loyola Marymount University. At school, when it came time to decide on his senior thesis, he says: "Everyone was picking their projects and I was like, it would be fun to do this weird mystery video game." But he was pretty sure he wouldn't be allowed to do it. "At some point somebody's going to say, 'You have to do a normal thesis,'…but that never happened, and so I made the whole game." CRIME SCENES this page and opposite page: Woodard has fun with an evidence board to map out scenes from his crime-solving video game.