Recreating the Spirit Animals Game

The goal: Remake the SA game in HTML5 and get it back online --- Feel free to shoot me a message!

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The Ex-Spirit Animals Game

The Spirit Animals game was a multiplayer browser and mobile-app game based on Scholastic's book series of the same name. The books ran from 2013 to 2018, with the game remaining active until July 2019. The Android version of the game can still be downloaded here and be played in offline ("guest") mode, and iOS users who have previously used the app can reinstall it from their "Purchased" menu and do the same.

The game was originally built in the game engine Unity, using the Unity Web Player technology. The Unity Web Player is now obsolete: web browsers started phasing out support for it and similar plugins in 2015. Furthermore, the game was tightly linked to Scholastic forum accounts, which, obviously, any fan servers for the game would not be able to connect to. These factors mean it isn't feasible to do a bit of technological magic and get the game up and running again. (Immediately.)

But the game was a good game, and it's fondly nostalgic, and this does make a good project. Hello, my goal is to rebuild the Spirit Animals game and get it (unofficially though it may be) online again.

Technology: three.js, a WebGL-based 3D graphics library, to substitute for Unity and its Web Player. This is not a real game engine. Not using a game engine will make the process slower, but this developer doesn't like Unity and does like stupid optimisation challenges. If you're tech-y you can try to convince me to use Godot. If not I am going to learn so much about game engines.

Assets and art: Nicked from the decompiled original game.

Network/multiplayer: Currently considering socket.io. Have not tested its suitability for this game's multiplayer modes at all, yet.

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Sorry, you lot. Told myself the next thing I had to do was put aside the game stuff for a moment and fix the Discord bot, and now it's been a couple of months I've been procrastinating that.

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Quick progress check-in: Rewritten the nickname-setting components of the bot (Added the ability to check your nickname and change your nickname, alongside the more important internal changes so that setting a nickname fails less often). Worked out how to write some automatic tests, though they still can't test what it will look like inside Discord.

That's maybe the first third of the bot. This has ended up as a rewrite, rather than a gradual update, so the bot on the Discord server will be stuck running the old version until the full new one is complete.

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I just found this account and wanted to say that this is so cool! I loved these books as a kid, and it's awesome that someone is trying to bring the game back. And reading through your updates is super fun, even if I don't understand anything about making games.

Thanks! Making the updates interesting to read is definitely the goal, super glad to hear they're being enjoyed!

It is really cool to find how many people still think of these books and game.

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Sorry, you lot. Told myself the next thing I had to do was put aside the game stuff for a moment and fix the Discord bot, and now it's been a couple of months I've been procrastinating that.

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Progress Update: Discovered the Bile

See this update on the forum

If I stop sharing updates for a few months, it might be that I'm feeding strange substances to animals until I know how to turn them into raging monsters.

Righto. The big task you've seen me working on for the last few updates is converting old game assets to formats I can use. And you saw that the exported boss animals in the last update were missing their colours. A "shader" is a program that takes in a bunch of information about the shape of a 3D model and what colour that model should be, and draws it onto a 2D computer screen.

Shaders have to be very fast, so they're often the part of a game where you'll get specific versions written for your specific machine. I've got the code for the shaders of the old game: there's more than 200 variants of each shader, depending on the capabilities of the computer that wants to run it. And unfortunately, with the way they're built, none of them run in Three.js, where I'm rebuilding the game.

Why do I need to look at these shaders when the player demo doesn't need them? Because the exporting program is smart enough to identify simple materials, and swap out the Unity version of the simple shader for the Three.js version of the simple shader. But it doesn't know custom shaders, like the Bile effect over an animal (pictured above on an animal that it wouldn't be seen on in the actual game). So I need to recreate the custom shaders that the old game uses in Three.js.

Unfortunately I didn't realise Three.js has not just one but two easier ways to build shaders than the one I used for this. I suspect it'll be much faster to set up the remaining custom shaders in the simpler shader systems.

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Are you the only person working on this project? Props to you!! Is there anything we can do to help?

Hey, thanks! Yes, it is just me working on this.

Honestly, at this point, even if interest completely dropped off, I'd keep chugging away. It's a great project, been teaching me a lot. I'm having fun.

That is to say, I'm not struggling for help. I'd be happy to find subtasks and give them out to people who think they would have fun helping out, if there's people out there who want to do that, but it's in no way a necessity for the project to keep moving forwards. (and any tasks I could find would probably require some computer programming skills. No idea how many people here have those.)

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holy fuck, I didn't realise people were still interested in this. I read these books when I was like 10 to 12 and just started looking back at them today (now 20).

probably the only book series I've ever followed through on, even though it's short in comparison to others. seeing this project come to life would be incredible

A long time - and I'm older than you!

It's really nice to be able to look back at things you spent time with years ago and remind yourself about them. There's still copies of the books around, but I would love to have the option to play the game again, properly, too. That's absolutely part of the reason for trying to make this happen.

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Hello - I've just found your account and had to say, I'm so excited! I played the game when it was first released, up until it was taken down. I had every available book added, every unique greentoken item, and was somewhere between level 150 and 200. So many people would ask me for advice and I loved giving it. Played that multiplayer wave mode with tons of different people lol - it bugged out so many times I eventually messaged a dev asking if they could patch it. To my knowledge, they did, and then the game went down a few months later :')

Thank you for working on this, and I hope you're enjoying it, it's not too stressful, etc. <3

Those level numbers are such an achievement! Incredible. I spent hours experiencing random crashes on that multiplayer wave mode too. Really cool if they fixed some of that, now I'm slightly disappointed I didn't get to play it in those last few months!

Thanks for looking out for me: I am enjoying this as a project! I can tell that a lot of the foundation work I did across 2025 should let me move faster and be more accurate to the old game, but it is a shame there's not more to share with people yet. Appreciate your patience, everyone.

As a side note: genuinely, sorry for the delay in answering these messages. I usually try to respond pretty promptly. Thought I could delay just a week or two this time, until I had my next update ready to share, then got sucked into a tangle of invisible work and must have lost track of the passage of time.

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Progress Update: Other things that move

See this update on the forum

To create the player demo, I had to figure out a process to export 3D models with their animations. My next step is to export all the other animated entities, starting with the animals.

The spirit animals were very easy to export. The enemies: not so much. The glowing Bile effect that covers enemies comes from a shader that's broken in my current old game extraction files, and so cannot be exported nicely. I'm investigating solutions to fix or replace that shader.

Anyway, take a look at what happens when I export all of the bosses (even though they're missing their textures for now). The people working on the old game lined all their default positions up in a row, to see them all beside each other. Well, nearly all.

(The human silhouette at the far back is Low Resolution Drina. She's normal size and resolution for a character in this game, she's only low resolution compared to cutscene Drina.)

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so excited to see the char demo working tytyty!!! been following u for a while and i always love to see updates :D

Great to hear you're enjoying it!

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I was so happy to see the character creator page up and running, I had to try and recreate my main character from way back when! I belive her name was something along the lines of Harmony Windsong.

I dodnt look through all of the options but the one thing I noticed was that the van boots appear in the wrong place. Other than that it's great to have a bit of nostalgia to play with this morning, thank you for doing this :)

Glad I was able to make this happen for you! Love to see people's characters.

Thanks for checking everything was working, too, and letting me know. Those boots should now appear in the right spot.

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It's Live: Player Model Demo

-> https://keeperofgreenhaven.net/demo/player/ <-

Loading may take a couple of seconds, in which you'll only see a blank green square. I'll investigate putting in a loading bar.

Tips for controls (touch):

One finger drag to rotate the camera

Two finger drag to pan the camera

Pinch to zoom

Tips for controls (keyboard+mouse):

Left click drag to rotate the camera

Right click drag to pan the camera

Scroll up/down on the character or its background to zoom in/out

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Three small improvements have now been made:

Ram boots are fixed.

Added a loading screen and progress bar.

Reduced loading time anyway (by turning on compression for the file transfers).

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It's Live: Player Model Demo

-> https://keeperofgreenhaven.net/demo/player/ <-

Loading may take a couple of seconds, in which you'll only see a blank green square. I'll investigate putting in a loading bar.

Tips for controls (touch):

One finger drag to rotate the camera

Two finger drag to pan the camera

Pinch to zoom

Tips for controls (keyboard+mouse):

Left click drag to rotate the camera

Right click drag to pan the camera

Scroll up/down on the character or its background to zoom in/out

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Progress Update: Demo Default Player

See this update on the forum

Among other improvements to the player demo, the default character now looks different. I found "John Doefault" here in the code, and in the spirit of keeping with the old game, John Doefault survives in this demo.

Funnily enough, as well as being a play on "John Doe" and "default", you can argue the name "John Doefault" does fit the Spirit Animals game character naming format. You're only prevented from naming your Keeper John Doefault by the fact that none of the three components "John", "Doe", or "fault" are available in the multiple-choice naming menu. Sorry.

In other work:

Been working on code to let me easily read and use the "game database": a set of files that contain all of the information about the buffs, item drop chances, display names, and corresponding file names of every single item in the game. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to include the "ArmourLength" of every piece of armour, which is what I need to know to know which parts of the arms/legs to hide for this current demo. I'm debating whether to guess the "ArmourLength" of every armour piece based on its appearance, or keep digging to find the "true" lengths.

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Progress Update: Player Character Demo in development

See this update on the forum

Alright, let's get back into a routine of giving you guys status updates. If all goes well, by the time you see this, I'll have a small buffer of update posts.

What you see above is a screenshot of the interactive player demo I'm working on. It'll let you design your Keeper and give them any colour variant of any available armour. I have managed to export every player animation, so it isn't even a static mannequin - you can make it move!

This player demo will go up on the website for you to play around with, once it's ready. What parts aren't ready yet? Well, in the screenshot you can see the player's skin hands clipping through the gloves. Different pieces of armour need different parts of the hands/arms/legs to be hidden when that armour's being worn, but I haven't implemented the logic for hiding those yet. The text labels could also do with some improvement: "eyes dye" sounds like a concerning substance!

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Hi, I don't you I've you've still got access to the discord server but a user has been hacked and put spam messages in all of the channels

Ah yeah, I've been neglecting that server. Thanks very much for spotting that. Those messages have now been cleaned up.

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Are you still doin’ this or… Because I would love to see it!

Still working on it!

At the moment, though, I can give no predictions about when anything will be ready/playable.