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This is pretty common in 3D work. Blender has a feature called “blend shapes” that implements a similar interface, and is commonly used for complex facial animation and general model parameterization.

Duolingo did a talk at their Duocon conference about how they use parametrization to animate the characters in their app.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgOqvyPif3g

(no affiliation)

Their post on Polygonal Map Generation for Games [1], from 2010, got me into procedural generation in general.

[1] http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/...

That's cool - I had been thinking with the OP site that quite a number looked like they were scowling/angry so a way to vary that is interesting to explore.