Planeguin

Overview

Planeguin is a first-person VR flight simulation adventure where players become a determined Mama penguin piloting a handmade ice aircraft across the melting Antarctic. When a Southern Giant Petrel abducts her baby, the impossible becomes necessary: a penguin must learn to fly. Players engage in aerial combat, chasing down the Petrel while managing a melting aircraft system. Blending cartoon realism with cinematic storytelling, Planguin explores themes of resilience, motherhood, and overcoming physical limitations. This game is designed for immersive VR interaction, Planeguin delivers emotional narrative, tactile flight mechanics, and mid air rescue in a compact but intense experience.

My Role

• Defined the overall aesthetic direction: a hybrid of cartoon realism and stylized Antarctic geometry
• Designed and refined the Mama Penguin, Baby Penguin, and Southern Giant Petrel with a focus on VR readability and emotional clarity.
• Developed custom action animations (cockpit interaction, intro and outro animation, Southern Giant Petrel flying animations) to support gameplay responsiveness
• Conceptualized and designed the cockpit layout for VR interaction and intuitive controller mapping.
• Designed UI systems in the game, logo, and thumbnails

Key Art

Process

Planeguin was my first VR project, and it fundamentally reshaped how I approach interactive design. Transitioning from traditional screen based development to immersive VR required rethinking every design decision through the lens of spatial interaction and performance. In VR, UI placement affects comfort, scale influences emotional impact, and small interaction flaws can cause motion sickness, so aesthetic choices could not exist independently from technical implementation. As Art Director and Producer, I led cross-disciplinary collaboration across XR engineering, environment design, aircraft modeling, and sound, ensuring visual cohesion while aligning creative intent with hardware constraints on Meta Quest 3. I managed scope toward both exhibition and store submission milestones, made the strategic pivot from AR passthrough to full VR immersion to strengthen narrative coherence, and prioritized stable frame rates and optimized assets to maintain performance. This project strengthened my ability to design embodied interaction systems, balance creative ambition with technical feasibility, and lead production within real world constraints skills I am passionate to bring to future XR and interactive media teams.