Building Moonjump's debut adventure game · Canberra

Building a new game on a custom engine.

I'm Kieren — founder of Moonjump, an indie studio in Canberra, Australia. Most of my time goes into our debut title and the in-house Starlight Engine powering it. On the side: motion capture and tutoring frontier vision models at xAI.

Visit Moonjump → See what I'm building
Scroll
Currently

Building an adventure game at Moonjump.

An unannounced title backed by Canberra Screen and Games Fund — running on Starlight, an in-house engine purpose-built for it.

moonjump.com

A small studio. A long game.
An original engine.

Backed by the inaugural Canberra Screen and Games Fund. Heading to PS5, Steam, and Switch.

Visit moonjump.com →
Funded
Canberra Screen
and Games Fund

Inaugural recipient — early-stage development support announced March 2026.

Government grant 2026
Shipping to

Three platforms, one codebase.

The engine targets console and PC from the metal up — not late-stage ports.

PlayStation 5 Steam Nintendo Switch
Starlight Engine

A bespoke engine for a bespoke game.

Raylib-based, rebuilt for console. Custom renderer, ML-driven locomotion, and every layer chosen — and written — to fit the game we're making.

Custom renderer

Hand-written GLSL.
Pixel-by-pixel control.

SSAO, volumetric lighting, skeletal skinning, and a deferred pipeline tuned for the look of the game — not the average.

Foundation

Rebuilt on Raylib internals.

Full control of the render loop, asset pipeline, and platform layer — small surface, deep customisation.

C / GLSL · cross-platform Core
Neural locomotion

ML-driven character motion.

Mocap data feeds a learned animation system — natural transitions, contextual gait, no clip libraries to maintain.

Trained on in-house captures ML
Side role

AI Vision Tutor on the Vision team at xAI.

Helping shape how frontier multimodal models understand the visual world — turning two decades of motion-capture intuition into structured feedback.

Selected Work

Performance capture & motion sets.

A cross-section of recent client deliveries, shipped motion sets, and long-form productions.

Shipped title · all body anims 2021

The Forgotten City

Recorded, cleaned and edited ~820 unique animations for the critically acclaimed standalone release.

Lifetime
820+
Animations shipped on The Forgotten City alone
Experience
2 decades
Reading and shaping human movement for screens
Motion set2024

Snowstorm

50 unique motions — harsh weather, minimal visibility.

Motion set2024

Lever

48 motions — UE5 trailer, ik_handgun-aligned interactions.

Motion set2024

Thug

52 motions — NPC blunt-weapon prop interactions.

Client previs2024

Character Select Previs

Multi-stance mocap recorded and edited for a UE5 soldier character select screen.

Mercedes MBUX
Automotive2022

Mercedes MBUX

Motion capture for internal Mercedes development of the MBUX in-vehicle system.

NDA project
NDA2023

Confidential

Large-scale capture for a project under NDA. Details on request.

The Studio

In-house mocap pipeline.

The same volume that captures performances for Starlight powers the occasional client project. Owned, maintained, operated end-to-end.

Volume

23 cameras.
Sub-millimetre tracking.

An Optitrack-powered volume tuned for high-fidelity body capture and rapid iteration.

Optitrack
23×
Cameras in a dedicated, calibrated volume
Pipeline

End-to-end, in-house.

XSENS Link SuitMVN Animate Pro
Autodesk SuiteMotionbuilder · Maya · 3DS Max
Server stack1 Gbps fibre · Cloudflare
Get in touch

Have a project in mind?

Custom motion sets, performance capture, character previs, or a chat about your mocap pipeline — happy to talk.

[email protected] → moonjump.com