Outerloop Games

Art of 'Thirsty Suitors'

Thirsty Suitors is a narrative-driven RPG that explores themes of immigrant identity, family reconciliation, and relationship dynamics through a unique blend of turn-based combat, cooking, and skateboarding.

• Outerloop Games utilized a hybrid 2D/3D art style in Unity, employing custom toon shaders and rim lighting to create an illustrative aesthetic while leveraging 2D sprites for character taunts and narrative elements to save production time.
• To manage a small, fully remote team of 12–16 people spread across four continents and seven cities, the studio relied on asynchronous communication via Slack, Notion, and Miro, with a single weekly sync meeting scheduled to accommodate time zones in Beijing, Brisbane, and the US West Coast.
• With only one dedicated animator, the team implemented an automated lip-sync system using blend shapes and eight phonemes, allowing them to animate 21 speaking characters by feeding scripts and audio files into a spreadsheet-based pipeline.