LA30A Troll Maze

Intro

After taking pictures of a norvégien Troll and a hedge maze from Bergen Norway, how could we build an experience that recreates the Troll fairy tale as a game? Starting with these photos, we used a variety of AI tools to produce the characters, world, and interactions of Troll Maze in Unreal Engine.

Story

A troll lives under a bridge, blocking your path. You try to pass it by going into the hedge maze, but the troll may catch up with you...

What it does

The Troll and the player can run around in the maze chasing each other to try to find the exit.

How we built it

Fed the troll images into ComfyUI, used nano banana to remove the background around the characters, nano banana to post the characters them into A-pose, then used Tripo to generated 3D geometry with textures (multi-reference P1).

The player character was made with concept images in Gemini, fed into Tripo for 3D geometry and texture generation, and exported to Unreal. The Unreal animation is based on GASP, unreal's updated animation framework - what gives the main character motion matching animation blending library) and the NPC troll character movement was based on Unreal character controller with custom animation blueprint scripting on the upper body.

Integrated the new Unreal 5.8 Model Context Protocol for AI-assisted Unreal development.

Modeling and texturing with Tripo AI, and rigging with Tripo fixed in Blender. Audio Clips generated with Suno and Google Lyria. Maze reconstructed from the photographed Maze plan. HDRI reconstructed with a single jpeg with ComfyUI workflow. Unreal MCP as our assistant for anything Unreal. Lots of intricate Unreal 5.8 Blueprint work that controlled gameplay and orchestrate a troll chase sequence in the maze.