Research

I started off by gathering research in a Miro board including moodboard, flowchart, storyboard, notes and sketches. Here I developed the idea of a lush flower landscape growing in realtime, where no plants seem to be the same. The player would start in a rather dark setting, and the core gameplay would be to affect growpatterns by interacting with the flowers with the goal to build a lush and dreamy flower world. I got hooked on anthers when studying flower parts, and decided to give them a central role and named the project Anthervoid.

Base setting

I made the base setting in Unity featuring a black sea, sparkeling under the rise and set of two suns on a black sky to give a mystic extraterrestrial impression. As background audio I used a looping river sound together with a mystic ambient one to enhance the atmosphere. The water is a custom shader on a high poly plane (objects far from the player is deactivated to improve performance). I made the water shader in shadergraph, where I distorted the positions in the fragment function over time to get the moving waves, and played with refraction, depth color, and moving normals for the fragment function. The final touch with sparkles was made with post processing.

Procedural modelling

In Houdini I was working with procedural modelling to create a few tools for flower parts and leaves. Unfortunately, Houdini is not made for real time alterations of parameters. Instead I choose to export model libraries for the leaves and flowers using a python script, where I randomized some parameters I’ve detected for modelling variations, to generate full libraries of unique models. For the leaves and petals I was using blend shapes to be able to give them a bit of extra variation in Unity. I built a tool in Unity to randomly put together flower parts and materials to further increase the flower selection. I gave the materials gradient properties to be able to assign each plant a different color combination within a preset color palette.

Procedural mesh tool

For stems and roots Houdini offers a great tool called L-systems, which is constructed to mimic the natural growth of plants using sets of rules. L-systems offers the possibility build beautiful plants, but I was stuck with the issue of how to grow them procedurally in Unity in a natural looking way with infinite variations. Inspired by L-systems, I decided to develop my own plant generating mesh tool in Unity. I generated mesh in Unity by adding vertices and triangles to a Mesh component, and I applied vector mathematics, angle-axis rotations, trigonometry, and did some general thinking to develop the tool. I put time into constructing the system with different rules and parameters that would define and variate the mesh, for example: sides, radius, length, tapering, rotation, bending, curvature and randomization. The parameters are stacked into rule sets which determines how the plant should grow once initialized. In the end I managed to develop a dynamic plant generator, where plants could be generated and grow during runtime, with parameters and rules that could be modified by a player to create different plants. Since the tool could generate stems and roots with any size and shape I made a tri-planar projection shader to avoid the issue of calculating good looking uv:s for such dynamic model.

Inventory

For the player to control the plant growth I made an inventory, which stores the anthers the player picked. Since most flowers will be to far above the player to reach, the player can pick them with a ray instead by pointing towards a flower, and press the activate button when it is highlighted. I was using events to hover a flower and pick the anthers. The anthers contain all data for the flower using a scriptable object. When picking an anther the antherdata is sent to the inventory. There are currently 6 types of anthers, and if the inventory already contains the picked anther type, it will be stacked to that slot but it wont affect the antherdata in the slot. If the anther can’t be stacked, but there is a free slot, the anther will be sent there along with its antherdata. If the inventory is full, the anther will just be thrown away. When picking an anther the player also collect anthergy, which is an energy needed to alter the antherdata.

The second level of the inventory is where the player can alter grow data for the selected anther. When the inventory is open, you open the second layer by pressing the y-button and a ui menu for the selected anther is displayed. The player can select anthers by spinning the circle of anthers with left joystick. In the ui menu the player can change values for different grow properties by using anthergy. Changing properties will fill the splice meter, and when full the player can merge the growth rules for the anther with another anther to create new growth rule sets. The menu also contains a toggle for tooltips, which gives information of a feature when hovering an ui element. In the ui menu I was setting up functionality for different ui elements including toggles, buttons, meters, sliders and dropdowns, which the player interacts with using the right hand ray.

I was eager to make a fun inventory by combining 2D and 3D, and it ended up being glowing in pink with a sci-fi/fantasy inspired theme. I made all sprites for the UI elements in photoshop and found a fitting font. The inventory have two layers. You open layer one with the x-button on the left controller, which will display a circle of small 3D anthers in the left hand with a text with the quantity above. From here, the player can pick any anther with the right hand and toss it into the world and a plant will grow. I used an onCollision event to detect when to instantiate an anther and made it follow the hand as long the activate button was pressed, then added the velocity of the xr controller when letting go of the activate button to throw away the anther.