A Mixed-reality garden of wonders and discoveries.
Lumina is a casual MR game for the Meta Quest 3 that lets you create an interactive digital oasis right in your own space.
2024 MIT Reality Hack Finalist
MR Art direction, game design and worldbuilding, asset creation, VFX & particle effects, custom shaders
What sets Mixed Reality apart from other immersive technologies and how can we meaningfully leverage it to build a unique experience for the player?
How can we engage players without giving them total agency of their experience?
How can we motivate players to be active and inactive?
Through Lumina, we set out to create an antidote to the busy world we live in while showcasing the unique potential of Mixed Reality.
Leaning on the concept of Skychology, our game targets the ceiling as a blank canvas for an imaginative and magical garden.
However, the player does not have control over how the garden will take shape. The kinds of plants and where they will grow are a mystery, causing surprise and delight for players. We decided this is the optimal approach to motivate players to plant more seeds and be immersed in the action.
The game encourages playful actions through intuitive interactions with seeds & plants and also rewards inaction through stillness and observation.
Our team consisted of 2 developers (Yolanda and Tejas), a creative technologist (Simran) and 2 designers (Vien and Bini). We delegated the development tasks according to our strengths and interests. My main role was the art director as well as 3D artist and game designer of the group. My contributions to the development are outlined in detail below.
One unique aspect of Mixed Reality is that digital assets will be integrated with the player’s physical environment in real time. We tested several aesthetics through quick concept art mockups to develop the right visual language. The intention for the game is to be visually engaging yet meditative while also playing well with a typical indoor environment and lighting.
We decided on what we called the Dreamy Fantasy aesthetic for its visual appeal and transformative quality of the player’s space. That being said, The final art direction also echoes the Sci-fi and Paper Aesthetic in its own way.
Unlike most games where foliage is part of the backdrop, the plants in Lumina are the stars of the show. I modelled the plants from scratch using Blender. Each plants design is fully modular, utilizing Geometry nodes for maximum flexibility and adjustability. The custom textures are hand painted by me in Adobe Substance Painter.
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We wanted the vegetation to grow organically and be observable by players. There are different ways to make this animation possible. A custom shader wascreated by one of our developers, Yolanda, taking inspiration from the development of the game ABZU. I further refined this shader and tested it in Unity to achieve the final result.
Animating with the shader also sped up the prototyping process compared to rigged animation, because a single shader can be applied to all the plants, as opposed to hand animating each plant. The same shader also enables subtle movement in the plants that emulate a slight breeze. In the end, this approach not only expedited development but also allowed great flexibility for quick design changes.
The garden concept was chosen for this 6 week project because of its straight forward game loop: collect seed, toss it to grow, once plant is fully grown, harvest to get more seeds. This simple progression couples with a rich visual language evokes the intended relaxing yet engaging gameplay experience. When the core game loop was eighty percent implemented, Yolanda and I brainstormed together a "Gazing mode", a special game mode that rewards the player for pausing and "smelling the roses".
I worked to refine our interactions by closely collaborating with the developers. Storyboarding allows me to breakdown each interaction sequence and communicate the timing of different elements. As a result, we were able to efficiently prototype and improve the main interactions such as tossing seed and harvesting seeds from the plants.
Finally, as an extension of the art direction, I designed all of the UI elements to help guide the player with the main gameplay. We originally planned for a fully interactive onboarding experience but due to time restrictions and prioritizing of polishing the main gameplay, we opted for this simpler approach. Sometimes, less is really more as this direction also integrated beautifully with our interactive NPC.
In addition, I crafted the effects using Unity Particle Systems to further elevate our gameplay. The particles share the same hand crafted textures with the rest of the assets to maintain the visual cohesiveness of the game experience.
Overall, the team is quite happy with the final experience and with its unique art style and gameplay that is engaging and relaxing at the same time. We learned a lot about the Meta Quest Presence Platform which enable a team of 5 to achieve a high level of polish for our game in a relatively short amount of time. We are planning to release Lumina on Applab so please stay tuned for that.
Gameplay improvement:
Seamless title screen and fully interactive onboarding with NPC
Meaningful correlation between seed combinations and plants outcomes.
Better contrast between Building and Gazing modes through more refined visual elements
NPC improvement:
Autonomous movement
More meaningful interaction that leads to stronger bond with player
