The Task

Genies, Inc. had the goal of giving the users more control over their avatars' wearables and increasing the amount of user generated content on the app. We had to come up with a design system that worked as a mobile experience in Unity that gave users broad customizability and control, while still maintaining the Genies art style and quality.

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My Approach

Through cross-functional collaboration with Creative, Concept, R&D, and Engineering, we established a system of “generative wearables” that allow different models of clothing to be swapped interchangeably and with customized maps that allow users to add their own custom patterns to subsections of models.

Creating the models was no easy task. Some of the collections that the concept team designed had hundreds of elements within the collection, and they each needed to fit together seamlessly no matter which design the user chose. From a production perspective this was also a huge undertaking to track, as there were no established tracking systems for “subsections” and “elements”  of models. We also had to figure out new technical requirements, including new polycount limits, texture sizes, adding a custom map to create color “zones” for user customizability, and working with new UV mapping requirements.

I worked with the other team leads to establish the modeling requirements, wrote up documentation, created an internal tracking system for each collection, and oversaw the modeling process, holding reviews and providing feedback for each model as they progressed.

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We also had an excess of work to do under the deadline that we needed to hire an outsource agency to take on collections. After their contract was signed, I provided everything they needed to get started on the work with documentation, video tutorial explanations, and example files, as well as giving feedback for each delivery from outsource.

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Results

The internal team with additional support from two outsource studios successfully launched a Generative Wearables MVP and went on to publish 8 generative collections in total, completing the product OKR.