As a kid, when you have to come back to the hospital on a regular basis it can be dull and a little scary. We created a space where kids could look after their own little friend and trigger lighting in the room as a way to pass the time and take their mind off their situation.

I worked on concepting, look development, AI, level design, particles, shaders, materials, asset sourcing, lighting

Kids use a web page on their phone or tablet to send packages and customize their character.

We needed to see the characters clearly, so I structured the levels around a subtle rake, like a theater stage, and made sure there were no large obstructions they could get lost behind.

Each platform has a spawn point for the packages kids can send in. When a package is sent, an event is triggered with the character’s ID. The character is then told which spawn point to travel to, and this sets the character in motion.

It was important to the hospital that the nighttime scenes were not scary. I made the lighting at night feel more like the lighting of a stage or theme park to get that passage of time still and keep it from looking sinister. The cloud shadows are achieved with a plane off-screen with multiple layers of noise that cast shadows.

Shaders for the characters I created in Amplify Shader Editor, a plugin for Unity. This was much more performant than the Substance Designer shader made for the prototype Fish Tank project previously but lacked the parametric pattern. Instead, users could choose between one of several patterns. We combined three customizable colors with masking provided by our modeler and the pattern chosen by the user. This gave the characters customizable coloring options for different parts.