Thumb Guy.

Tom Campbell

Tom Campbell is a multimedia designer who specializes in creating content on the Roblox platform. He’s the creator of the cult classic betting game, Rat Race. Currently, he's working on a showcase game featuring his character, Thumb Guy. His skills include graphic design, 3D modeling, programming, and game design. He loves learning new things about making digital media.

Thumb Guy???

Meet Thumb Guy. What started as screwing around with Roblox Studio's avatar importer went viral on Twitter, and now he's the focus of my senior thesis. Thumb Guy was modeled and rigged in Autodesk Maya and textured in Adobe Photoshop. Included will be a playable demo on the Roblox game platform where players can explore a small world playing as Thumb Guy. I would like to make a Thumb Wrestling game in the future with Thumb Guy. I have too many thumb puns (not gonna force any in this bio because it'd be awkward and stick out like a sore thumb).

So, what is this supposed to be exactly?

For the uninformed, Roblox is a gaming platform for games creating using Roblox Studio. The site has roughly 20 million different virtual experiences, and 30.6 billion (with a b) hours engaged since 2008.

Thumb Guy started as an experiment with Roblox Studio’s new skinned meshes system. In layman’s terms, it’s what lets video game characters bend their whole body but remain in one piece. The tools let me model and rig a character in Maya as one would normally do, but would allow me to bring that character into Roblox Studio in an efficient manner.

I figured I would save him for a rainy day when Roblox provides tools for creating platform-wide avatars, but after showing a cropped screenshot of Thumb Guy on Twitter I racked up roughly 3 thousand likes and dozens of retweets, replies and new followers. There’s no telling when I can make Thumb Guy an official Roblox avatar, but I can make a game with him. So for my senior thesis I set out to create the best showcase I possibly could for showcasing the potential of something delightfully insane.

Where can I play as Thumb Guy?

Check it out at the link right here! You will need a Roblox account in order to play.

Hop in and socialize with other players in a custom world built in Roblox Studio. A world where everyone is a thumb abomination that may or may not have been inspired by a certain movie.

Coming in a future update will be the ability to further customize your Thumb Guy like in the thumbnail above. As a way of generating revenue I can set up a virtual shop players can purchase outfits with Robux, the currency used on the Roblox platform.

In the future I intend to revisit Thumb Guy and give him a proper game. The obvious idea I had was a fighting game where you play as Thumb Guy. Take a wild guess what it will be called: Thumb Wrestling.