Smooot
A small mobile app created by a team of three: myself and two other students of the Texas A&M Visualization program. As a team, we brainstormed the initial concept, produced 3D assets, and combined those assets with code to create an Android app. Smooot was created over the course of about three months— mainly using the Unity3D Game Engine, Autodesk Maya, and Adobe’s Substance Suite.
Thanks to my team:
My Contributions
I did all the programming, shaders, final optimizations, as well as the importing of models and animations. I worked on creating some the models— notably the main character, “Saylor the Snail.” I also animated all the UI elements in-engine. In addition, I handled most of the project management.
The game was programmed entirely in C# using the Unity3D Game engine.
The Rig
I modeled, surfaced, and rigged “Saylor the Snail” to be the main character of the Smooot mobile game.
The rig features a simple blend shape facial system; ribbon-based stretchy joint system; and an automatic aim control for the shell, so the animator can focus on animating the character rather than fixing the shell every frame.
The Design
Smooot was created to be a set of minigames college students could use to relax between classes. Although I wasn’t responsible for choosing the initial direction, I helped to choose and implement the two mini games we were able to complete:
Card Matching Game
Word Search
The card matching game was relatively simple to implement, just choose a grid size and scale the cards accordingly, then spawn them across the screen. What ended up being a bigger challenge was making sure all the UI elements scaled properly across different phone screens.
The Word Search, although simple in theory, was much more satisfying to complete. It’s made random each time by first taking a set of potential words and placing as many of those words in random locations on the board until it fails a couple times. Then the rest of the spots are filled with junk letters. Getting the lines to follow the player’s finger and stay behind the letters took some fiddling, but ultimately the UI scaling was the biggest challenge here too.