Fujii

Fujii is a VR gardening / exploration experience I worked on for the amazing Funktronic Labs. I helped out with the following:

Assisted with level design, prototyping, and building
Modeled and textured environments and plants
Handled the art pipeline to automate asset creation, exporting, and manage asset organization in the project and scenes
Helped define custom workflows for creating interactive plants
Created animation blend trees and C# scripting behaviors for NPCs.
Profiled and implemented optimizations to reduce draw calls, create LODs, and perform custom culling
Prototyped gameplay mechanics for musical plants

You can check out the experience here!

Funktronic describes Fujii as:

A serene, mystical journey that traverses a series of otherworldly, organic landscapes, Fujii is a respite for weary travelers. The experience flows between outdoor exploration and creative gardening, merging aspects of adventure and cultivation into a refreshing, musically enveloping whole.

Features:

Hike through three diverse biomes, collecting seeds and exploring their enchanting flora and fauna
Collect seeds and grow vivid, surreal plantscapes, cultivating your own unique home garden
A meditative, musical gardening adventure that offers a unique and restorative VR experience
Relax in your garden with your companion gnome, and introduce critters and insect life sourced from the wild

Level Design and Editing

Starting from initial concepts as an inspiration point (both drawings and Quill sketches), I helped to refine the level design by roughly laying out levels in 3d (using ProBuilder or Maya) to get a sense of the spatial relationships and user flow. By doing so we were able to shape levels to be elegant and intuitive for users. When we started user testing, this process paid off with users rarely being confused about where to go and what to do when traversing a level.

Original concept art for Biome level.

Revised concept I created to simplify the level to fit the budget.

Call & Response Plant

I helped design the UX for some of the plants, as well as the creating prototypes and art mockups.

The following shows some a "Call and Response" Simons Says mechanic for playing musical notes by tapping the petals of a plant.

Call & Response Mockup

Call & Response Musical UX

Kelp Plant

Here you can see a kelp like plant that worked like an interactive sequencer where players had to grab the orbs on the vine at the correct moment in time with the beat.

Kelp Concept

Kelp Musical UX

Kelp Bloom

Gnome

I worked on the animation pipeline with support for facial and body animations, as well as multiple headdresses that could be swapped at runtime. I setup the animation blend trees for different expressions and gestures, including systems for dynamically controlling where the character was looking or pointing. Finally, I helped with behaviors for different interactions in the game.