Date Everything (IMDb) is a sandbox dating simulator set in the comfort of your own home, featuring 100 fully voice-acted datable characters! It's published by Team 17 and developed by Sassy Chap Games. It was released on June 17, 2025, and holds a 94% (very positive) rating on Steam!
In this game, you are given a pair of magical glasses called the "Dateviator." With them, you can interact with almost all objects inside the house! When you put on the Dateviator, you can see the 2D human form of the objects and talk to them. Eventually, your conversations will determine whether you end up as a "friend," a "lover," or a "forever enemy" with them!
There are 2-4 animations for each object. There is the "normal animation," which is the animation that plays when you interact with the objects without the Dateviator on. Once you establish your relationship as a friend or a lover with an object, you then unlock the "magical animation"! The animation depends on the personality of the object. For example, the fridge does a monster howl at you, the knives do a sword fight, the toaster does a happy little dance, or the seasoning rooster hops around the counter.
As the Lead Animator and Rigger, I was responsible for leading the 3D animation direction, asset rigging, and asset implementation. I was tasked with creating and designing game-ready rigs for animation, helping develop an efficient pipeline between 3ds Max, Maya, and Unity, and supervising additional animators by offering constructive feedback and time management expectations.
This was originally going to be a third-person game with a player character. I rigged the character, did some test animations with it, and started on some object animations. We then switched to a first-person game. Since then, there have been quite a few large batches of model updates to the scale and UVs. In order to preserve the existing animations, we set up null objects for animation so we could swap out the objects below the null without needing to duplicate the animation data.
The other challenge we faced was importing animation from Maya to Unity. We set up the model with layer hierarchies and made sure the same objects used the same structure across different animations, so the animations could be swapped between different states.
The director, Ray Chase (Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, X-Men '97, Final Fantasy XV), really poured his heart into coming up with all these animation ideas! Our other animator, Emily Kalish, did a fantastic job creating and designing the animations!
Date Everything has been nominated for a TIGA Award for "Best Narrative & Storytelling" (September 5, 2025), made the longlist for the 2026 BAFTA Games Awards, and won Best LGBTQ+ Indie Game and the Gayming Fan Favourite Award at The Gayming Awards 2026!
Here are some examples of the in-game animation that I did:
