It’s not often that Puget Systems is able to work with a customer during a major watershed moment for their business – and not only be present for it, but be an active participant helping them through exciting new opportunities. That’s precisely what happened with SOKRISPYMEDIA. We took some time to speak with Sam Wickert, Founder and Creative Producer / Director of online entertainment for SOKRISPYMEDIA, to learn more about what they’ve been up to. 

Sam has an impressive background, specializing in highly produced, visual-effects-styled content including award winning virtual reality films and games. His work with SOKRISPYMEDIA on such high-profile projects as HBO’s The Last of Us, Epic Games, Mr Beast, and Redbull, truly speaks for itself.

The company is also home to a team of highly skilled artists and storytellers, creating premier content with a portfolio stretching across such genres as games & interactive, commercials, and previs / techvis. They’ve thrown themselves into work that taps into their deep skills as well as their passions – one of which is their YouTube channel. With over 3 million subscribers and over 750 million views, YouTube serves as the primary distribution hub for their original projects, including their most popular series: Chalk Warfare.

Getting Interactive

Inspired by the global success of the Chalk Warfare film series—which has amassed over 350 million views—the team has been quietly working for the last few years developing a full-scale video game based on the franchise. In fact, it was this very success on YouTube that led SOKRISPY to develop a game based on the Chalk Warfare intellectual property. In response to viewer comments, feedback, and requests, they set out with the goal of enabling their fanbase to interact with the IP in an entirely new and engaging medium.

In the course of our conversation, Sam shared his perspective on the decision to pivot to creating a video game. He also discussed the nuances and overlaps between game development, content creation, and storytelling using Unreal Engine, which has been their primary platform for creating this entirely new experience. Sam told us that, “At the end of the day, it’s really not a different direction for SOKRISPYMEDIA. We’ve spent the past 10 years using Unreal Engine to make content for major projects that we’ve worked on, like HBO’s The Last of Us, doing previs using Unreal Engine for example. It was while working on this project in particular that we had a major epiphany!”

“We’ve really become accustomed to using real-time rendering to do graphics in 2D film, but we realized that there is something beautiful about game development and content creation; it’s a medium for creating cross-over experiences. We realized that we have this incredibly valuable IP in Chalk Warfare, but we really wanted to build it into something more. Something our fans can really immerse themselves in and engage with.”

“We also realized that not only had Chalk Warfare been viewed millions of times, the data was showing us that people were watching it over and over. So it was at that moment we realized we could create something that people don’t just consume. Chalk Warfare is a 16-minute long film, and people were watching it over and over again. We wanted something more than that for our fans, we want to actually allow people to play something for hundreds of hours! So we’re using the same technology we’ve always used for the past 10 years, but we’re just jumping into a new medium, which is very exciting for us!”

Listening to Your Customers

Great things happen when you listen to your audience. It empowers you to create something you know they’re going to love. That’s SOKRISPYMEDIA’s goal with Chalk Warfare. 

Sam continued, “We’re really excited about making something that our fans have wanted for years. As the technology and the gaming engines have gotten better and better, and our teams have been really honing their craft, we have this unique opportunity to bring our style and flare to games and making something our fans can enjoy for hundreds of hours and not just a rewatchable flat 2D film that doesn’t change.”

“And there’s nothing wrong there’s nothing wrong with that. Through our YouTube channel, we’ve done it! Our videos have gotten 400 million views and now I’d love to be able to give our viewers an even more unique experience.”

Developing Chalk Warfare: Teaming up with Puget Systems

Chalk Warfare, a first-person action game based directly on the wildly popular YouTube series, has a really unique feature that just doesn’t exist in any other video game on the market: the ability for players to hand draw their weapon of choice, and integrate it into the game in real time!

This integration is not a re-skin, but instead involves AI and machine learning to train hundreds of weapon types. The AI models account for how weapons are held, fired, recoiled, and reloaded. The real-time integration from drawing to in-game appearance occurs within a few seconds.

SOKRISPYMEDIA relied on Puget Systems workstations in key development phases of the game. Their team built a bespoke matching model for the weapon drawing in the game, and ran the AI training on hardware provided by Puget Systems.

The Hardware

If you are looking for workstations or servers to power AI training and inference, Puget Systems offers computers that are specially designed to maximize GPU performance and VRAM in a variety of form factors.

SOKRISPYMEDIA’s Chalk Warfare game is still in development, but you can check out their website to stay up to date on it and their other projects. If you haven’t seen the original Chalk Warfare series, or some of their other popular videos, they are all available on YouTube.