Explore Tropics Game

An interactive, low poly, tropical environment designed for exploration. This project was done entirely by me. I curated the assets, designed the level, added the lighting, particles, sounds, etc. Iterating on the previous Explore project, the scene is packed with much more animals, foliage, and other dynamic components. I’m happy with the overall ambience I created.

When designing a map in VR, almost always should the assets be optimized for max performance. The calls, batches, and polycount can easily skyrocket in even a small level. I sourced all the assets online and processed them using a custom tool to pack multiple materials into one. This saved significantly on batches and draw calls.

Water was problematic to render in VR. Many water shaders are not single pass rendering, and even the ones that are, are usually not performant for mobile.

Another small issue was creating the NavMesh for the environment, our tool doesn’t display properly on non-flat surfaces. It’s deeply linked to Unity’s NavMesh so it’s not easy to fix, instead I manually made the path using primitives.