Master Ice Sculptor

Master Ice Sculptor is a XR/AR experience where you have to sculpt a figure breaking ice blocks using your hammer carefully. Feel a magic experience with real physics and the latest Meta Technologies.

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Inspiration

Since 2017, I’ve always believed that AR games could be a paradigm shift once the technology was ready to support them. After releasing six traditional games on Android, I thought it would be great to bring my latest title, Master Ice Sculptor, into an AR experience.

In early 2024, I created an AR adaptation where you hold your hammer using your device. It wasn’t bad, but the interaction didn’t feel truly realistic due to technological limitations.

Eventually, I learned about the Meta Horizon Start Developer Competition, and I thought it was the perfect moment to migrate Master Ice Sculptor to Meta Quest 3 and try to create an authentic immersive experience.

What it does

Master Ice Sculptor is an XR/AR experience in which you sculpt a figure by carefully breaking ice blocks with a hammer. You use your hands to grab the hammer and strike the ice blocks with force to break them.

The game implements the latest Meta technologies—Hand Tracking, Occlusion, Scene Mesh, Passthrough, and Highlights—combined with accurate physics, sounds, FX and meticulous gameplay details to deliver a truly immersive experience.

How we built it

I’m employeer, so I have working on Master Ice Sculptor in my free times and yes, in my sleep hours as well. I’ve working with Unity and Visual Studio maintly, and with Blender ocasionally.

Challenges we ran into

  1. Initial setup. There was some initial concern about installing libraries due to the usual issues and their subsequent basic usage. Fortunately, Meta has done an excellent job here with its seamless integration with Unity and, of course, the wonderful Building Blocks. With just a couple of clicks, you can have your scene running on the headset with passthrough, hands, and controllers. A solid 10 here.

  2. Detecting the closed-fist hand gesture through the Meta SDK. This was the gesture I chose to implement the open-palm / closed-fist interaction. However, after testing with other people very close to the final phase, we noticed that some users kept dropping the hammer even though their fist was closed and properly tracked. After investigating, we discovered that the issue came from the natural behavior of the pinch gesture, which imposed a limitation on the hammer-grip logic, as each person places their thumb differently. Fortunately, I found a solution quickly by using the hand-finger transforms to calculate the phalange angles.

  3. Smooth and effective physics. The game visuals were initially choppy, but by adjusting the refresh rate to match the physics update frequency, and by configuring the correct rigidbody type for each interactive 3D object, we achieved unprecedented smoothness.

  4. Fine-tuning the hammer-hit logic to deliver the most realistic sensation possible.

  5. Pre-fracturing the 3D model in Blender, including normals and vertices. This caused many issues because it produced glitches in the ice blocks and the sculpture, and degraded the quality of the real-time fractures generated on the ice blocks.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. A project completed in 3 weeks: the first week focused on the setup, and the following two weeks dedicated to an intense but fun development process.

  2. Implementation of all ideas, both the predefined ones and those that emerged during the testing iterations, thanks to effective critical decision-making.

  3. A project delivered with production-level optimization and gameplay smoothness.

  4. Achieving a highly addictive, user-friendly, and universally accessible game mechanic.

  5. Having worked with cutting-edge technology with huge potential. I already have hundreds of new ideas!

  6. Feeling that I created an experience that takes a step toward a paradigm shift in traditional gaming.

  7. Seeing that everyone who has tried Master Ice Sculptor so far (around 30 people aged 20 to 65) finishes with a big smile.

  8. The realization of a dream that had been in my mind for years.

What we learned

  1. The decision to develop a fully immersive augmented reality experience required me to deepen my understanding of Unity’s PhysX engine in order to deliver the most realistic experience possible.

  2. Previous projects that were forgotten or abandoned can one day become truly useful.

  3. Both during development and in the final phase, it was incredible to see how augmented reality taken to this level can produce unprecedented immersion in terms of unconscious perception. Users naturally performed actions such as trying to hand the hammer back to someone else or dropping it on the floor before exiting the game, among many similar situations. This forced me to make several design decisions at the video-game level. An amazing experience.

  4. AI it's your friend. The wonderful LLMs helped me save a huge amount of productive time, assisting me with the initial setup, Blender, mathematical operations, Unity physics, and even modifying and mixing different shaders! This allowed me to focus on the most important aspects of the project.

What's next for Master Ice Sculptor

  1. More hammers
  2. More sculptures
  3. More interactions and improvements
  4. Gems system: sometimes when you break a ice block, a gem falls in scenary and the user has to take it or throw it to basket to catch it.
  5. Model freemium: in free model you can reveal a new sculpt by each day. In suscription mode you can reveal all sculptures at the moment.
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