Intro

My Sunday evening project, Find Poly is evolving into a cross-platform title — mobile, desktop, XR and VR. The most technically interesting part for me is the monetisation, how player platform preference incentivizes certain purchase preferences.

Find Poly™

It’s an offline application with a potential co-op mode focused on finding your friends by their non-AI-like movement patterns.

The 2022 NPC Test

  • What happens when agents collide over time?

  • How does behaviour emerge when systems are left to run?

The 2022 prototype explored collision, direction bias and interaction memory. Over time this directed the character and what I consider to be a franchise.

In Pixel Arcade™ there is an achievement “Find Poly” here is the foundation of the developed lore. A primitive low poly character with actual character in VR space.

A lightweight node-based customisation system was introduced — hat, torso, simple modular swaps. Just enough variation to create recognition without breaking the low-poly language.

Cross Platform Interface Design

During my PhD I developed a 3D interface system for MR and VR that required only hand interaction — no controllers.

The design was informed by an earlier 2D UI prototype for find poly so im pleased that its evolution could result in an end to end 2D > 3D interface approach. Minimal borders, subtle skeuomorphic cues, clear feedback. Enough visual language to guide intent without overwhelming the scene.

This system was validated in both MR and VR, and implemented end-to-end inside Pixel Arcade on Steam and Quest.

So the game design works across platforms with different types of input but the same game and levels.

  • Touch
  • Cursor
  • Hand tracking

Core Loop

The game is a simple, find the character type game.

The scenes are environments telling a story of human history from primitive shapes to guide the player and teach the player the basic concepts, gradually working through the stone ages through to industrial revolution and then space race.

Side quests: “Tap the woman crossing the road. She’s looking for her lost dog. Find it, return it, unlock gems or limited cosmetics.”

Automated Marketing

This procedural level generation opens up the opportunity for headless game builds to automatically create video content levels for short form platforms like YouTube shorts, tiktok and Instagram. I will leave it as that for now.

Concept Art

Have a look at some various art and ideas over the past 7 years below.

tbc

Further Reading

Check out the following links for inspiration and further reading about this topic

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