INTRODUCTION

Dear readers of the Cascadeur blog, good morning!
It is with great pleasure that I introduce myself to you: I am Manuel, the developer of Mutation and owner of the Ossified Games® brand.

I am 31 years old and have been a 3D generalist and programmer for several years. In the past, I worked in academic contexts, focusing on retopology and repairing Etruscan artifacts acquired through laser scanning. My work has also included teaching 3D modeling in high schools and giving public lectures at various comic conventions.

I transitioned to the video game industry as a professional after developing safety training simulators for Unipro Srl using Unreal Engine 5. I thought to myself, "Hey, this is fun! Maybe I could dedicate myself to video games instead of educational projects," and so I did.

Today, I want to share how Cascadeur has significantly helped and accelerated the workflow of an independent developer like me.

RELEASE TRAILER

ABOUT THE GAME

Mutation is a procedural first-person Dungeon Crawler Roguelite with survival and RPG elements, set in a sci-fi Lovecraftian theme.

Players gain experience, unlock skills and new items, face increasingly dangerous threats, and must find a way to escape the impossible structure of SigilTech.

Add to that an abomination that mutates its form with every run, relentlessly hunting the player, minor monsters that make survival even more challenging, and a layered crafting, leveling, and skill system; you'll get hours of gameplay (and replayability).

THE CHALLENGES OF A SOLO DEVELOPER

Mutation was entirely developed by me, a humble independent developer. It all started with a cube, an idea, and the target persona I wanted to entertain (in marketing terms, the persona is the ideal customer for whom you're creating the product).

Let me introduce you to Jake:

JAKE: THE TARGET PERSONA

Jake is the fictional name I gave to the target persona I identified as the ideal customer for Mutation . This approach helps ensure that the game is designed to entertain the player, not the developer. Every professional creating a product from scratch for an audience follows this principle, and I relied on this system as well.

After defining the target persona, I moved on to conceptualizing the product based on their preferences, spending a few weeks on game design and outlining all the assets I needed to develop.

Of course, as an independent developer working on a project funded solely by a limited personal budget accumulated over years of work, I couldn't afford a full team of animators, modelers, sound designers, and the rest of the crew. For some aspects, I had to rely on friends ( for example, the lore was co-written with Antonio Gabbriellini, and the music was partially composed by me and Mattia Gabbriellini.) For other elements, such as basic 3D models and animations, I had to turn to the Unreal Engine Marketplace (now known as Fab) and some 3D model generators for minor characters that I heavily modified in order to make them unique assets.

That said, a game also requires more complex assets, and many models, textures, and animations were handcrafted. Creating a character from scratch for an indie title ( from concept to animations ) can take up to a week. It goes without saying that any tool that speeds up asset production is highly valuable. Among these tools is Cascadeur, an AI-powered software that simplifies animation by incorporating physics laws, believable interpolations, ragdoll effects, and dynamic object interactions at the click of a button.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that, for rigging and animations, Cascadeur has sped up Mutation 's workflow by at least 50%, making the process significantly easier.

ANIMATION WITH CASCADEUR

[Comparison: Cascadeur and Unreal Engine 5]

Usually, when creating “combo” animations like these ( where two or more characters interact ) you have to animate each keyframe to address every small discrepancy in their points of contact. Cascadeur, however, has greatly simplified this process by compensating through its AI-powered automatic physics properties.

Cascadeur adheres to all the conventions of traditional 3D animation software, ensuring users don't feel disoriented. At the same time, it revolutionizes and enhances key aspects of the workflow by introducing powerful tools that accelerate development and make the process more intuitive and less technical.

For instance, the following animation would have been very tedious to create without Cascadeur's auto-physics. The software automatically calculated where the arms and legs should move. In this scene, the player is grabbed by a tentacle descending from the ceiling, which belongs to a monster in the game (though the monster didn't need to be included in the scene for the animation). The grabbed foot is the left one, while the right foot is influenced by physics
 

NON-BIPED CHARACTERS

Cascadeur has delivered excellent performance even with non-biped characters, and I'm not just showcasing a quadruped. Let me introduce an eight-legged spider-like creature!



The Blightweaver is a creature that dynamically climbs any surface, and this is its death animation. Since it's a climbing creature, I had to ensure that some of its legs remained firmly attached to the surfaces it was on at the moment. The auto-physics added a pleasant swinging effect as compensation for the body's lowering, thanks to intelligent interpolations and the limbs' inverse kinematics.



As you can see, the red squares represent the “fixed points” that remain anchored to the surface unless I explicitly command them to move (you can observe how some slide along the ground to compensate for the body's lowering, but they never lift off) . Animating such a creature with these secondary movements in any other software would have required a significant amount of time. With Cascadeur, it took me just over an hour; including the manual rigging I did to set up the character, all within Cascadeur.

WHY I RECOMMEND CASCADEUR TO INDIE DEVELOPERS

If you're short on money and time, Cascadeur offers an affordable solution for what it provides: intelligent animations where even those without extensive knowledge of anatomy or physics can create highly realistic animations. Mutation is a horror game, and it demands deep, believable, and sometimes explosive realism.
Working with this software is stress-free, offering an incredible sense of freedom, allowing you to embrace the artistic side of this work without getting bogged down by excessive technicalities.

COMPATIBILITY

I've never had a single issue importing or exporting with Cascadeur. Everything worked seamlessly; rigs were always correctly read by the game engine, as were the animations.
The auto-rigging feature worked gently on imported skeletons, ensuring no adjustments were needed and enabling the incredibly convenient auto-posing functionality. (Remember when I said you don't need to be an anatomy or physics expert to use this program? Auto-posing automatically adjusts the character's body position, and you can then layer auto-physics on top of this position for an even more realistic result.)


[Lurkit creatures inside the game performing some Cascadeur animations]

GAME RELEASE

Mutation launched in Early Access on January 29, 2025 , and has so far been acclaimed by critics and various publications, including an article on Horror Geek Life . It even made the homepage on IndieDB and has amassed over 1000 hours of streamed gameplay viewed by users online on platforms like Twitch, Facebook Gaming, and YouTube.

GAMEPLAY TRAILER

CONCLUSION

Developers and software companies should always collaborate in ways that create incredible results and help us improve together! For me, Cascadeur was a godsend essential for releasing the game on schedule with the current content.

You can play Mutation today on its official Steam page!