Art direction, UI and character animation for an existing medical simulation app

About the project

WHAT THIS IS I am a medical student in Paris. I have built a clinical simulation app used to train for the OSCE, the practical clinical exam in French medical studies. You take charge of one patient, from admission to handover, and you are scored the way an examiner would score you. To be clear from the start, because the genre name misleads: this is NOT a hospital management game. No staff, no inventory, no finances, no room building. One patient at a time. The medical content and the scoring system already exist, they are mine, and you will never have to write or judge any of it. WHERE IT STANDS The product works. It is a web application (Next.js / React / TypeScript) with a complete game loop, a scoring system, medical content and an automated test suite. It is not a prototype and it is not an idea on paper. Visually, it is not there. Sixteen hospital rooms and twenty-four corridors exist as pre-rendered Blender stills, at decent concept-art level. Patients are drawn in SVG and recoloured from the case data. Nothing moves — there is no animation of any kind today. I have attached five screenshots of the current state, unretouched. Please look at them before bidding; they say more than this description. The interface is in French, which is the product's language. WHAT I WANT The whole visual package finished, animation included. Not a light restyle — a product that looks and feels like a real one. 1. ART DIRECTION AND INTERFACE — the main piece, and it is genuinely open. The visual direction is not decided, and choosing it is part of the job. I am not handing you a style guide to execute. I need someone who can commit to a direction and hold it across a dozen screens. One warning: the current accent colour is orphaned. It was chosen for an earlier illustrated look that no longer exists, and the game is now made of desaturated grey-blue renders. Treat the palette as an open question, not something to defend. 2. PRE-RENDERED 3D INTERIORS (BLENDER) The existing rooms and corridors need materials, lighting and believable volumes. Important: the 3D is a production tool, not an execution technology. We render once to a still image; the app only ever loads images. 3. CHARACTERS AND SIMPLE ANIMATION The drawn patients no longer match the quality of the rooms. I want characters that do, plus a set of simple animations that make the scene feel alive rather than frozen. THE ONE HARD CONSTRAINT — please read this before proposing an approach Every clinical case needs its own patient. When I write a case I describe a person: age, sex, build, skin tone, hair. I need to generate that character myself, in my own authoring tool, without a developer. And that generated character must inherit every animation already produced for the game, and fit it perfectly. I am not going to commission an animator each time I write a case. In practical terms: a shared rig, an animation library authored once, and new characters that bind to that rig and retarget cleanly. If your approach cannot deliver that, it will not work for me, however good it looks. If it can, that is most of what I am buying. ON THE TECHNICAL APPROACH — genuinely open, and I want your opinion The product is a web app today. I am not attached to that, and I would rather have this conversation than shut it down. I did rule out a real-time engine earlier, and here is the reasoning so you can argue against it: my 3D is pre-rendered, so a real-time engine would spend a GPU recomputing images that are already computed, and the web is currently how the product reaches its users. But that reasoning was made about STATIC decors. Now that I want animated characters, it may no longer hold — and I know that skeleton-sharing and animation retargeting are mature, solved features in some engines. If that changes the calculation, tell me. I would rather be argued out of a position than defend it out of habit. So if you believe a different approach is right — Unity, Godot, a web 3D layer, something else — make the case. I am listening, and a good argument here is worth more to me than agreement. Four things any proposal has to account for. These are not preferences; they are what the project is: - I BUILD AND MAINTAIN THIS MYSELF, WITH AI ASSISTANCE. That is how the current application was written, and it is how it will keep evolving between contracts. It works today because everything in the project is text a model can read and write. If your approach moves a large part of the work into a visual editor — scenes, prefabs, inspector wiring, node graphs — say so honestly, because that directly reduces what I can do on my own afterwards. This is the single point I care most about after the character constraint, and it may well be the reason to stay on the web. Convince me either way. - There is a working application: game loop, scoring, medical content, tests. I am not saying it can never be rebuilt — I am saying tell me what that costs and what happens to it, rather than assuming I will fund a rewrite. - The web is currently how the product reaches its users, alongside a mobile app. If your approach changes that, say so plainly. - I author my clinical cases myself, with no developer in the loop. That cannot become a paid step. ONE HONEST CAVEAT Twenty-two buildings and four playable cases today. The structure is built; I am writing the content case by case, myself. Better said now than discovered later. BUDGET I am a student. My budget is limited and I will not pretend otherwise to attract bids I could not honour. The scope above is bigger than one contract, so I want to work in lots. The first would be deliberately small — a proposed art direction applied to one or two screens — so we can both see how we work together before committing further. The budget on this listing is for that first lot. What I can offer besides money: a project that is genuinely finished underneath rather than another app idea, a clear scope, and someone who knows what he wants and understands technical constraints. And work whose usefulness is concrete — medical students use this to prepare for an exam that decides their career. HOW TO BID - a portfolio; the work shown matters far more than the CV - one sentence on what interests you in this project specifically - what you would do for a first lot, and your rate - if you think I am approaching this the wrong way technically, tell me why I reply to everyone.

Skills required