Learning Games Network was brought on to assist in the redevelopment of an old PC/Mac title called Zoombinis: The Logical Journey. Fablevision, the studio tasked with recreating the game, had not used Unity to develop a game of this scale before. Because of our extensive Unity experience, a co-worker and myself were brought on as Gameplay Programmers to assist in the redevelopment of the game. Development started in the Fall of 2015 and lasted around 9 months.

One initial hurdle to overcome was figuring out how to get the extensive amount of art and animation recreated and into the game. We decided to have the artists work within Flash and we would export everything to Unity. While we used a plugin to do handle the basic rendering of the various different movie clips, we needed additional functionality on top of what the plugin provided. In order to sync and drive the hundreds of animations in the game, we developed a synced animation system that utilized information exported from Flash to drive the Unity game objects. This allowed the artists to develop great looking work in Flash, and everything would translate perfectly to Unity.

In addition to developing our Flash->Unity pipeline, I developed many of the core systems used to drive the Zoombinis behavior, and puzzle systems. Each programmer took on a subset of puzzles to recreate, and worked directly with the artists and original designers to bring each puzzle back to life. I was responsible for Allergic Cliffs, Stone Cold Caves, Mudball Wall, Stone Rise, and Bubblewonder Abyss -- pictured in the screenshots below.