Genopets

Monarch Gaming approached me to help build what they call Genopets. Genopets are 3d animated characters generated on the fly. That means that both their materials and models needed to be hot-swappable. On its own, this wouldn’t be too hard, however, what made it difficult was that this all needed to run on a website and it needed to be fast. That puts loading all the models and all the materials upfront out of the question. I was able to build a system for Genopets that would asynchronously load models and materials over the web. Genopets used the system I built in their MVP demonstration to investors, after which, they acquired funding. My contract work for Genopets slowed when their goals switched from web to native, using Unity, a platform I have very little experience in.

Before I was contracted, Monarch Gaming had commissioned artists to design and create 3d models of their characters. The problem was that these models were created by artists used to working locally, not on the web. I started tackling this challenge by recreating and adapting the models to find what would best work on the web. Then, I used what I had discovered to write a modeling and design specification for creating future Genopets.