Hi-Score

I was brought on early in the development cycle of this game as the requirements were very unique. The vision was to tackle pachinko in a slot game like format. Having pachinko in the game presented a very unique regulatory problem because results need to be mathematically provable as fair. Ideally, you'd be able to just drop some balls on some pegs using a physics engine and tally up the balls as the exited the board.
So because of these limitations we settled on the idea of created a tool purposely built to create and bake hundreds of animations for variations of each possible ball path. This was the tool I was brought on board to create and it would eventually become Oatari. Named for the Japanese word for "Jackpot".

I also worked on special effects for this title, 3d animation, and digital painting.

OATARI

The tool was created within Unity using the newly release dots framework and ran parallel to simulate the pachinko board live with thousands of balls at once. The tool also became the effective board editor. Designers actually used the Unity project itself to place pegs and other elements who's transforms would be exported out. Once the board was set and the simulation run, it would automatically detect and map out possible paths for balls to physically traverse from each spawn point to each end point. This map was also exported out and used as a test for the math that would sometimes create outcomes that were not physically possible in the simulation.

Oatari, the tool, would then use this map with custom inputs to determine the requirements needed to finish collecting the required animation variations. This made the tool very flexible. Board setup could be changed live and the requirements would change to match the new changes. There were also features to have paths that were segmented, interrupted and completed later. This was used for the ball splitter feature but could of also been used to have a ball travel into the background for instance.

Oatari would finally collect each required animation for each possible path a ball could take, collecting position, speed, and collision data for custom effects and sound events. The resulting data was output as JSON and run within our custom game engine.

Other Work 

Even more than Oatari, I was also very active in the remaining development of the game. I created 3d spinning effects using Blender and After Effects. I used Trapcode Particular to create many different special effects including the splitter effect seen in the video. I also digitally painted the nebula background and animated it within After Effects.