Mixing Procedural & Hand-Made Ways in Unity

The team behind Crystal Companies has presented a cool little Unity tool they are using for their card game. The tool manages to mix both hand-made and procedural approaches, so they have both freedom and speed. They call their tool explosion balls.

“As we continue to improve the user-friendliness of our proprietary environment-building tools, we came up with a way to quickly add elements to blank maps: explosion balls,” said Devin Shepherd, one of the developers of the game. 

“Instead of navigating a series of complex parameter menus to procedurally generate a map, or hand-painting an entire map to look natural or haphazard, the balls enable the rapid iteration of terrain features.” A rather unique way of generating environments, don’t you agree?

The project is a collectible card game played within an immersive 3D, hex-based environment. The game offers players to Collect mercenaries, build an army, and skirmish against enemy forces on an interactive battlefield. You can learn more here.