Storm sequence in Luna. I was responsible for the moon shatter, moon spiral animation, and storm VFX, including rain, lightning, and thunderclouds.

I was responsible for designing and engineering the solution that drove Bird's animation system. I also built the event system and logic for the musical tone-based gameplay, in which Bird sings out a series of musical tones that correspond to a series of sculptural pods that the player must touch in the correct order.

Luna healing sequence. The player must trace the circular energy shape that is orbiting over each animal. I was responsible for conceptualizing the engineering system for this interaction, the visual effects art direction, and writing the C# code that managed the player's healing progress, drove the changes in the particle systems, and triggered various events on healing complete, including changes in the character animation system.

As the player makes progress in Create Mode, various critters spawn and move about the environment autonomously. Some of them even interact with each other; fish will mate and jump to eat bugs if they are close enough. The critters travel around the level by way of a path mesh system, detailed in other videos in this project.

As the player interacts with foliage in create mode, the levels evolve through a variety of visual effects and spawned creatures. I was responsible for the engineering logic that drove critter behavior (frogs and flies), as well as the dramatic theatrical lighting progress system and swirling mist that collects in the center as the player makes progress in the level.

Test video of the mist system at work. Getting the mist to convincingly swirl around the center of the level proved to be too much for Unity's physics system, so I chose a different approach, which used an invisible mesh (seen here), which had a specifically laid out set of radial UV's. I then baked the XYZ positions of the vertices of this shape into an RGB texture which the particle system could sample via a custom particle shader. By 'feeding' the particles updated UV info, I could force them to march along the undulating radial shape in a convincing manner.

Prototype tests for Bird behavior that did not make it into the final game. In this prototype, Bird can act autonomously and explore environment, plotting paths to various in-game objects, along with ground targets under the player's VR head and hands. Bird will animate in an entirely procedural fashion, with personality aspects (sad and angry shown in this video) such as posture, breathing rate, eye shape, look frequency and movement speed all derived from personality traits embedded in Unity scriptable object settings files. Bird is able to shift between random, user and scene-specific look targets in an orderly way, and can blend from procedural animation to keyframed sequences when needed, such as when singing to open the pod.

Prototype test for visual bonus system for growing trees. Bonuses are awarded for different metrics, such as planting trees in proximity of each other ("clustering"), planting certain numbers of trees, and distance between planted tree and a specific game object, in this case a sphere in the scene. The art here is quick and dirty, meant to be used for quick prototyping, but I feel it still conveys a good sense of humor and fun.

Path mesh system, used by critters in Create Mode for movement throughout the scene. Path meshes are procedurally generated linked meshes of way points, which can generated by mesh vertices or recursive hexagonal patterns.
GameObjects with PathMeshCritter.cs script can be assigned to move on any PathMesh in the scene.