About

Fruit Ninja VR started off as a personal development project conceived by Myself and a close friend while working at Halfbrick Studios.

Our initial success with the prototype caught the CEO’s attention and was greenlit for full production only two weeks after it initial inception.

My role on the project was Creative director and Lead artist responsible for translating not only the 2D game visuals into 3D but also collaboratively redesigning Fruitninja’s 2 dimensional game design to work seamlessly in a 3D space... which was trickier than just cut and paste.

We had to redesign and recreate the entire game from the ground up in Unity with very little existing assets being able to be brought across from the mobile game.

One of the major challenge was placing fruit in a curved 3d space so it was faithful the original game (where they pop up from the bottom of the screen) but also feel natural and ergo nomic in VR. This challenge required us to design waves of fruit that curved around the player and moved vertically in such a way that the player could easily reach them from their stationary position while creating interesting waves to slice for combos to maximise player enjoyment.

Through this process were able to build close relationships with Oculus, Sony PSVR and particularity Valve and Steam that both offered in-depth feedback and optimisation strategies for our Steam Release.

In all we managed to get a release build ready in 8 weeks. Today Fruit Ninja VR project has grossed over $1.2 million (circa 2018) in digital sales.

Not bad considering the game was was our first commercial experience in both VR and Unity development.

Below are examples of my work on creating Fruit Ninja VR