reGrow

reGrow was one of the two projects Fun Bits was working on (with Orbital Loop) for the then upcoming Google Daydream mobile VR platform, and the first project I worked on at Fun Bits that was really our own. The premise changed some over its development, but always revolved around the idea of growing and breeding gardens of flowers.

I was involved with two parts of this project. My primary contribution was to the graphical systems of the game, where I set up a system for spawning and animating large numbers of instanced meshes with minimal material overhead. This was important because, especially on the devices we were developing on (which were appreciably weaker than the intended production devices), draw calls were at a premium, and naively rendering potentially dozens of flowers, each assembled from half a dozen or more meshes was not feasible.

I also built several gameplay systems to allow designers to quickly iterate and not worry about system performance issues, and put together a system for modeling plant genetics and breeding.

Sadly, the project ended up getting cancelled, and all effort was consolidated into Orbital Loop until its release.