How Our Mascot Got Trapped in a Glitchy Game (and Why We Let It Happen)

Imagine this: one moment you're sculpting your studio mascot in a nice, controlled 3D space — the next, they're being hurled through an unstable pixelated vortex of unfinished textures, rogue rigs, and questionable code. Welcome to Frame Escape, our lovingly chaotic animation-meets-game-design experiment.

At Carse & Waterman, we're big fans of asking "what if?". And this time the question was: what if I-Me, our googly-eyed blue buddy, got sucked into a video game and had to fix it from the inside out?

Spoiler: the results are gloriously glitchy.

Meet I-Me: The Glitch Fixer We Didn’t Know We Needed

I-Me is more than just a mascot. They're a symbol of how animation can humanise complex ideas. So what better way to showcase the game design process than by throwing I-Me into the thick of it?

Frame Escape is a high-speed trip through broken levels, botched textures and half-finished environments — each level representing a key stage of the game dev pipeline: Modelling. Texturing. Animation. Problem-solving, with a side of slapstick.

And because it wouldn’t be a Carse & Waterman project without a little heart, we turned debugging into a hero’s journey. Think less "boss battle" and more "battling the boss’s dodgy shortcut folder."

Why We Made It

The project started as an in-house challenge: how do you explain the game design process in a way that’s not death-by-PowerPoint?

Turns out the answer is: let your mascot do the explaining. Poor I-Me learns the hard way how it all works — and in doing so, gives our audience a fun, visual tour of the industry tools and stages we often don’t get to show off.

But it's not just a fun ride. It also reveals what happens when storytelling meets software. The hiccups, the iterations, the moments where nothing works... until it suddenly does. And that’s where the magic lives.

The Takeaway

Frame Escape isn’t just a trailer. It’s a playful reminder of what animation can do when it steps outside the frame. It can educate. Entertain. Even get a bit lost in a shader graph now and again.

If you’ve ever wanted a sneak peek behind the scenes of 3D production — or just enjoy seeing a plasticine creature dodge pixelated chaos with surprising grace — this one’s for you.

🎮 Watch the full trailer now on our YouTube Channel. And if you see I-Me, tell them we’re trying to get them out... eventually.

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