Hello Kitty AR: Kawaii World

A Geo-location-based mobile game developed in collaboration with Sanrio.

Developed at Goodbye Kansas

I worked as a Unity Developer and Technical Artist, and was the main link between the programming team and the art team.

Some of my responsibilities included working with the artists to develop custom lighting shaders, and custom animation systems. I also created a character customization system and content pipeline to allow the artists to create a wide range of character cosmetics while minimizing device resources required.

I also worked on several iterations of systems for decorating the location-based world map with props and characters. This ranged from generating custom meshes based on map data to using Unity DOTS to fill the world with up to tens of thousands of individual entities while maintaining acceptable frame rates on mobile devices.

Tiny Terrariums

Build Terrariums for Nordic forest gnomes.

Made in Unity using HDRP

So far this project has focused largely on procedural art workflows. Both characters and the environment are procedurally modelled in Houdini and textured in Substance Designer. All animations are procedural.

UniRx by neuecc is used extensively for both game logic and data communication for driving animation. One example is the dust particles that are made with Unity’s VFX Graph and driven based on the character’s movement speed and root walking animation. The data is listened to through UniRx’s Observables.

Character Animation

Root Animation

The character root’s walking animation consists of three separate motions. Roll and pitch rotations, and an up-and-down bounce for the position. All three loops progresses at different speeds and vary in how pronounced they are depending on the character’s current velocity. This allows for a walking animating that’s still recognizable as the same animation, but with no noticeable loop.

The animation is supplemented by Unity’s Runtime Rigging package that allows for extendable animation re-targeting during runtime. Here a modified version of the Damped Transform component is used to dampen the movement of the character’s joint, giving it a soft, squishy feel. The Damped Transform component is modified to allow for an additional offset to be applied to it. This is used to apply wind effects, as well as pushing the body joints closer together when the character jumps and lands.

Wind System

The wind system mainly consists of a global wind vector that pans across a simplex noise based on the current wind velocity. Separate objects can easily apply their own local noise on top of the global wind for more variety. While currently only characters use the wind (especially visible on the hats) the wind vector can easily be observed by other objects.

I plan to feed wind data to VFX Graphs to create falling leaves and stylized wind lines that match the wind of the rest of the game.

Terrain Mesh Shader

The ground uses a custom shader made in ShaderGraph that triplanar maps up to four texture sets to the mesh. Instead of a splat map the mesh’s vertex colors are used to place the different texture sets (black, red, green, and blue). Blending is based on height maps for each texture set. Height values can be re-mapped per texture set and blending smoothness can be controlled through the shader. Tessellation-based vertex offsets can also be controlled per texture set.

The vertex color data is generated and baked in Houdini.

Filmbyn Småland

6 games for a children’s movie museum in Sweden.

This was a 9-month project for a Swedish museum about Astrid Lingdren’s (a Swedish children's book author) stories and the movies based on her books. I worked as a subcontractor for DreamStage, which was the company hired to handle the interactive, digital part of the museum. I was in charge of software development.

The 6 games included

• 2 Kinect games

• 1 Karaoke game

• 2 Quiz games

• 1 Video editing game