Nascent initially began just as a simple exercise for me to learn more about Niantic's Lightship ARDK and to mess around in Unity. It soon grew to a 4 month long obsession where I went back and forth between design and development, tweaking and adding features until it became an actual working prototype.

Throughout its design and development cycles, the vision for Nascent was to experiment with ways that XR technologies can be used to promote exploration and connection. I wanted an experience that does not demand constant attention, yet players should feel rewarded every time they use it.

The overall concept of Nascent was inspired by 3 different experiences : Pokemon GO, Kind Words II and Elden Ring.

For Pokemon GO, I wanted to leverage on Niantic's Lightship ARDK, using their maps feature to create a virtual representation of the current location of the user. The map can also be used to place virtual objects in a specific latitude and longitude.

Encouraging players to explore areas around them to connect with others aligns with Niantic's mission and vision, as such it was a no-brainer for me to reference their amazing work and utilise their technology for my prototype.

Kind Words II, a "cosy" game by the studio Popcannibal, had an interesting premise where gameplay was centered around connection. Users can send messages, write wishes, attend poetry slams and just "be kind".

That was the aim of Kind Words II and it was also a line that definitely inspired me during the design of Nascent.

With over 200 hours in Elden Ring (I wear this badge with honor), I found myself deeply engaged with the messaging system and how it served as a way to feel connected to others despite this being a "single player game" for most parts. Rating messages, helping other players and warning them of traps makes players feel like the world is alive and not just filled with virtual NPCs.

Along with my other inspirations above, their successes serves as validation that players enjoy connecting with players even if it is something as simple as a message left behind by someone else.

Nascent is a social experience all about connecting and creating communities. To that end we can split it into 3 "actors" and 3 phases.

The "main character" for Nascent. Wisp serves as the avatar for the user in connecting with other Wisps. In a sense, they are born through our innate desire to form social bonds.

From a more practical perspective, a rounded cylinder with 2 stumps for legs and a single plant on its head couldn't be any simpler. As I needed to keep this project short and focused, having a simple model would reduce time and effort in animating, rigging and performs better on mobile devices.

As an abstract representation of the space between conversations, the crystal is another major actor in Nascent. It acts as a temporary structure that players leave behind and contains messages that will initiate responses with other players.

A dreamscape is a temporal space whereby Wisps that have connected and responded to each other through a Crystal can interact and form a community.  It is a customisable world by the player that created the crystal at a specific location.

Seen from the outside as a translucent bubble, a dreamscape will disappear after 3 days, forcing players to seek connections with other players.

The Connect phase is all about letting players leave messages tied to physical locations. These message can range from questions like food recommendations to deep personal thoughts and riddles.

In the Respond phase, players can scan Crystals left by other players in their vicinity. They can then choose to respond via another message, a doodle or even a short tune.

Players that have responded to the same Crystal will have their Wisps transported to a dreamscape in the Gather phase. They can then control their Wisps to explore and interact with the virtual environment and other players.

Doing the tasks of both developer and designer meant that I needed to work on 2 very different tracks at the same time. Initially things were very chaotic, with new features being added without much thought into the overall journey.

As the features started piling up, I took the easy way out and just slapped a button everywhere to string the features together. At the same time, I was also too involved in trying to create the various logics and mechanics that I did not spend the required time to brainstorm and decide on the visual style of Nascent. This led to inconsistent and quite frankly, ugly UI.

In the end, I needed to take a break from developing to focus on the UI, UX and overall feel of Nascent. It was then that I crafted a proper process map and also pinned down the visual direction of Nascent, both in its UI and in the 3D dreamscape.

For the keen-eyed readers, you might notice that the dreamscape/hub world seen in some of my screenshots are different from the actual "floating islands".

Along with the fact that I was not aware of the complexity when building a 3D environment from scratch (my previous escapades were built using Spatial.io custom packages), the design of the environment itself had to be remade entirely.

The initial design, pictured below, leaned more towards a surreal aesthetic heavily inspired from "Monument Valley", a classic mobile game. However, from a game design standpoint, due to its linear and narrow paths, it did not function well as a hub world for players to interact with each other.

I was definitely not at a level where I could create a unique 3D environment by myself, in the timeline that I set out for myself. Hence I decided to scale back and greatly reduce the scope of the dreamscape. At the very least, I wanted an area where Wisp can move around and the environment still needed to be fleshed out while keeping interactions to the minimum. That in itself isn't a small task by any means, as I quickly realise the staggering amount of effort needed.

The broken fragment from the Crystal is meant to be the spot where players can read messages from others by interacting with it. The base model was sculpted in Blender and then transferred to Substance Painter where the final materials are applied. Substance Painter was an entirely new software for me and this was my first attempt at it.

As part of the dynamic environmental elements in Nascent, the waterfall was the one that took the most time. However, I decided to dug deep as I felt a waterfall was necessary to visually connect the 2 islands together and also create a better sense of scale. I was very new to the Unity Shader Graph system to create VFX but following this tutorial helped guide me through the entire process.

I was exposed to the many "smoke and mirrors" that is the world of VFX and it was amazing. The waterfall itself contains 4 parts : the base waterfall mesh, the foam that flows along the mesh, the ripple and then the splash. Piecing them together to sell the effect was almost as fun as seeing the final product!

Next I wanted to create a portal effect. This was done by mixing 2 different types of shaders into 1. First was a continuous inward ripple and second was the star field made using simple noise. This was done on my own after watching various tutorials and it was like a mini-assignment for me. I was happy about how it turned out, though on second thought having the star field might not make much sense. A blurred view of the teleported position might be better.

From learning about Navmesh agents, creating a simple level design and even controlling the player camera and movements was new and challenging but I am glad that it still turned out okay.

Nascent took me about 4 months while juggling a full-time job in the midst of another project. It was a project that I could have continued working adding on. I charted out many other features such as customisable worlds, being able to send music and scribbles and more interactivity in the dreamscape. There was also plans to introduce a whole new mechanic of Fragments, whereby players will be able to anonymously send limited messages to one another.

However, I recognise that I am still very much a beginner here and have lots more to learn. This is why I decided to call Nascent as completed and take on more courses and learnings before embarking on "my next big thing".