Lizards in My House

Lizards in My House is a demonstrative videogame, still under development, entirely made with Unity and based on the AR Foundation. The main goal of this app is to serve as a test case for advanced topics, usually concerning the integration of Curved Poly with important features such as animation or augmented reality.

Concept

The App is a typical simulation game where you start with a couple of gift lizards that you can breed and mate, in order to have more lizards to breed and to mate. After each mating there is a chance to get a new lizard kind because of random mutations. The game keeps tracking all the lizards you have found in a growing catalogue. There will be a few achievements to get in order to push the player towards some goals: such achievements will be simple things like reaching a certain amount of lizards or breeding some specific kind of lizard.

Futhermore, the App will use Augmented Reality and the Player will need to look for lizards on the floor in order to interact with them. The gaming will keep generating a map of the environment of the player house, in order to automatically find a spot for each lizard, one where they will potentially make a nest to breed their eggs.

Since it's a demonstrative application and a test case, i don't plan to make it huge or long to play. Actually, i wish to calibrate the game so that the player can fully experience it in 2 weeks. Basically, a lizard should take less than 12 hours to grow and get ready to mate. Also, the probability to get a mutation will be set high and after having a good group of lizards the player will be able to launch more mating events at once. In this way playing 15 minutes two times a day should be enough to allow the user to reach most of the achievements in the first 15 days.

Modeling and Animation

The lizards will all share the same geometry made with Curved Poly. On same kind I plan to have more geometric features like rings or other attachments for the body, the tail or the paws, but the body will be the same (this is one of the models which require Curved Poly - Maker).

It's interesting to point out that I'm using this model as a test case for the development of a new set of animation tools, made to exploit animation tools already available on Unity. What do I do? I store a Unity Mesh containing a low poly representation of the model. This mode is kept hidden with a Skinned Mesh Renderer applied to it. Any Unity animation tool working with Skinned Mesh Renderers (that meaning most of Unity Animation Tools) will work on the hidden low poly representation of the model. Than, I recover data from the hidden model and i use it to update the vertices and the normals of each lizards Curved Poly models.

Furthermore, I'm still experimenting on the hypothesis that on Curved Polygons Nets may be interesting to work more often with Morphing techniques instead of Skinning ones. This is because Curved Poly models are easy to morph (using Curved Poly tools) and uses a little amount of vertices compared to standard meshes.

For now, the only other models I'm using for testing animations techinques are the Mushrooms of Mushrooms Labs geometries.

Mapping Your House

I'm experimenting with advanced techniques to work with Augmented Reality. The main objective here is to exploits successive gaming sessions to build a map as accurate as possible of the gaming environment. The player will see lizards living in a little space of the room in which the game started, and then slowly try to conquer every room available on the same floor.

Technically speaking, there are two main algorithms I'm working on. The first algorithms uses point clouds to identify things placed on the floor. Lizards will try to build their nests near one of the forniture or behind a chair or a table, to protect them from people walking in the most open areas of the floor.

The second algorithm try to find possible routes to be used by lizards to move from one point to the other in a room. After some times, there will be an hidden web of paths on the floor and little creatures will use the paths to explore the house and find new spots for their nests.

Release

The app should be ready during autumn 2019 and will have only an Android version (with ARCore support) available on this site. Its release will be accompanied by the announcement of the project masquotte, the fifth of the Mushrooms Labs Mushrooms.