Project Details
My Maru is a mobile app that turns daily activity goals into a landscape you build. Each day starts as a Patch, a bare block of land that transforms as you make progress. Goal completion earns Effort, a resource spent planting trees, plants, ruins, and other features to bring the Patch to life, and past Patches connect over time into a continuous landscape of your progress. Alongside this growing landscape, the Maru is designed to be a personal companion that reflects your physical and mental well-being, with direct interactions, mini-games, self-care activities, encouragement, and social features that let you share and explore your progress with others.
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Studio: Maru Interactive
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Type: Digital Companion and Habit Tracker
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Engine: Unreal Engine 5
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Platform: iOS
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Status: Prototype
My Contributions
As a Technical Designer, I took ownership of prototyping procedural content generation, NPCs, and particle systems. Most of my work was done using Unreal Engine 5, Blueprints, the PCG Framework, and custom procedural tools. I also created and recorded custom in-engine cinematics using Unreal Sequencer for pitch presentations. My contributions included:
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Developed a pipeline that converted procedural mesh data into a format that could be consumed by Unreal's PCG Framework, allowing generated environments to be populated with procedural content at runtime.
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Built a procedural environment system that generated terrain, walls, and foliage at runtime using deterministic algorithms, allowing each Patch to be created dynamically rather than authored by hand.
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Created lightweight butterfly NPCs using a custom state machine and movement system, supporting high entity counts on mobile hardware while maintaining realistic flight and obstacle avoidance.
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Created a falling leaves particle system in Niagara to help exaggerate the contrast between barren and lush Patches and elevate the aesthetics of the experience.
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Used Unreal Sequencer to create custom in-engine cinematics for marketing and pitch presentations.
