Hello, I’m Karim, co-founder and Inventive Director at EPIC Company. I lead a group of proficient designers and collaborate carefully with expert builders at EPIC to craft good wanting and consumer pleasant web sites.
I’m carefully concerned in UX/UI design, from early prototyping to the design of full digital platforms.
I additionally dedicate a lot of my time to crafting sport ideas and 3D fashions for activation video games and immersive experiences.
By evening, you’ll typically discover me coding video games or experimenting with shaders, nonetheless chasing that spark of play and creativity that began all of it.
Highlighted initiatives
The Cursed Library
The Cursed Library is a ardour venture that blends my lifelong love for kids’s books, basic tales, and darkish, immersive atmospheres. I designed six unsettling worlds impressed by well-known tales, modeled solely in Blender 3D.
Powered by Three.js and customized shaders, the expertise unfolds as a journey by a haunted library, the place hidden portals transport guests into totally different dimensions.
Sound is on the coronary heart of the expertise. Each whisper, melody, and echo shapes the temper. The wonderful Steve Jones and Jules Maxwell crafted the haunting soundtracks, recorded the voices, and coded the intricate audio transitions.
Captain Goosebumps
Yearly at EPIC, we dedicate our time and experience to assist a trigger that displays our values. This yr, we selected to lift consciousness for Dwell in Shade, a Belgian group that promotes the inclusion of refugees by training.
To take action, we created a playful internet sport that includes a snowboarding goose that brings shade again to the world. Whereas the core growth was led by my colleague Théo Gil Cerqueira, I used to be chargeable for the artwork path, illustration, and shader coding of the path.
Purple Bull Sand Scramble
Purple Bull is a shopper we collaborate with frequently. I’ve been concerned in a number of sport initiatives for them, however my favourite is Purple Bull Sand Scramble, a fast-paced racing sport the place I developed a easy but environment friendly physics engine, together with the 3D modeling and gameplay design.
I labored carefully with Shamil Altamirov who developed the interface, and my affiliate Thierry Michel, who coded the entire gameplay and remodeled a tough prototype into an brisk, adrenaline-filled expertise that completely captures the spirit of Purple Bull.
Tiny Experiments
I’ve at all times had a mushy spot for small-scale initiatives. I take pleasure in crafting bite-sized experiences that discover easy mechanics and strategies in playful methods. I spend quite a lot of time experimenting on CodePen, the place I can give attention to the tiny particulars and polish each interplay.
Listed here are a number of of these experiments.
See the Pen
Skating bunny by Karim Maaloul (@Yakudoo)
on CodePen.
Skating Bunny is a small minimalist sport I constructed as a playful reward for individuals who contact us by our web site. It was an ideal excuse to experiment with the body buffer approach used to attract the skate marks and to craft customized shaders for the sleek, blurred flooring reflections.
See the Pen
Infinite Portals by Karim Maaloul (@Yakudoo)
on CodePen.
Two worlds are interconnected, sharing the identical digital camera view however present in numerous spatial dimensions. This experiment is one other tackle the portal results I beforehand explored in The Cursed Library.
See the Pen
Chill the lion by Karim Maaloul (@Yakudoo)
on CodePen.
Chill the Lion was the Codepen that acquired me probably the most consideration, I made it throughout a warmth wave, and someway, it went viral.
It was additionally one in every of my very first experiments with Three.js, the place I constructed a lion solely out of dice primitives.
Again then, I had no 3D modeling expertise in any respect. Studying Blender 3D afterward utterly remodeled how I design and convey interactive characters to life.
About me
I started my profession practically twenty years in the past as a youngsters’s e-book illustrator earlier than transitioning into internet design. I then joined a number of businesses as a Flash developer, creating wealthy interactive experiences. When Flash met its finish, I dove into Three.js, exploring new methods to deliver interactivity to the online by 3D experiences and video games.
What I really like most is mixing my illustration, design, and coding expertise to craft brief, playful experiences.
I take pleasure in infusing my very own artwork path into the code and always studying new strategies to raised categorical my artistic imaginative and prescient.
Lately, I’m most enthusiastic about Godot, an open-source, light-weight different to the large sport engines.
I’m additionally curious to see how AI will form and increase the artistic course of.
And naturally, I’m nonetheless inquisitive about Three.js, particularly TSL, a node-based shading language that simplifies the creation of shaders.
Instruments
I take advantage of Blender3D, Figma, Photoshop, and After Results day by day to form the design of my experiences. On the coding facet, I depend on Three.js, GSAP, and vanilla JavaScript to deliver my characters to life.
These days, with the rise of AI, I’ve been experimenting with ComfyUI, Midjourney, and VEO3.
Ultimate Ideas
Ultimately, instruments are simply instruments.
I as soon as noticed a calligrapher write a stunningly stunning phrase utilizing solely his finger and a few espresso as ink. An ideal reminder that the best ability one can develop is a pointy eye and a wealthy, open-minded sense of curiosity.
Codrops illustrates this concept by displaying that there’s by no means a single strategy to obtain an impact.
Mastering a method broadens your ability set, however what really issues is the flexibility to forge your personal path.
Thanks for studying this highlight!
