Kohaku's World

Kohaku’s World was a live variety show on Twitch, made at CyberForge by a team of two: my partner Kohaku, who hosted it, and me, the developer. Game streaming, comedy skits and movies with live commentary, all performed in a green-screen studio and shown inside virtual sets built in Unreal Engine 4.

I designed, built and made the art for its environments: a video-game basement and an arcade, each full of classic games playable in virtual and mixed reality, and a racing game with retro 1980s graphics and realistic vehicle physics. To put a live host inside them, I wrote a custom UE4 plugin that streams real-time video with transparency into the engine, with custom shaders to blend it into the sets, all running on commodity hardware. I also set up the video-capture hardware, designed the green-screen studio, and built the puppeteering: a Unity app driven from iOS devices over socket.io, streamed into UE4.

I made the show’s parody intros, including Star Trek: The Next Generation and Stranger Things. The synthwave theme song is by our friends the Space Bards.