I finished the Mysterions.\u00a0 What should have taken me only a few minutes to do turned into hours because I was having way too much fun thinking up of ways to animate them.\u00a0 And by “them” I mean the balls.\u00a0 Lots and lots of balls.\u00a0 But I’m getting ahead of myself here…<\/p>\n

First, here is how they looked in the original game:<\/p>\n

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To start off, I created a grid of 8 by 8 by 8 balls, or in other words a 3D grid of 512 balls.\u00a0 Then I whittled away the corners of the “cube” of balls until it was a “sphere” of balls.\u00a0 That left me with 208 balls.\u00a0 That was it for the work needed to be done in 3D Studio Max, and it was time to bring it into Unity.\u00a0 Here is a screenshot of how it looks in Max:<\/p>\n

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Now within Unity, I was able to play with the balls by creating a script to animate them.\u00a0 I tried a few things and then stumbled upon a really nice way to move and make them grow and shrink.\u00a0 It’s basically a very simple Simplex noise fractal algorithm that takes up only 13 lines of code, but if you watch the video you’d swear that there’s some kind of intelligence behind the movement.\u00a0 It’s so mesmerizing.\u00a0 Ok, I’ve kept you in anticipation long enough – here’s the video!<\/p>\n<\/div>