JUN HUANG
Type: Interactive Museum Exhibition
Role: 3D Artist (LookDev, Animation & Real-Time Visualization)
Games: Demolition Derby & Tower Defense
ESL Digital Worlds: Level Up
The Strong National Museum of Play (2023)
ESL Digital Worlds: Level Up is an interactive exhibition at The Strong National Museum of Play that invites visitors to explore digital games through hands-on play. As part of the exhibition, two custom games were developed to run on large displays with physical controls: Demolition Derby, a chaotic driving game, and a Tower Defense game that uses physical towers as input devices. Both pieces are designed for children and families, and they focus on how people come to understand systems—speed, collision, defense, and strategy—by playing with them rather than reading about them.
Demolition Derby
Concept & Player Experience
Demolition Derby is a top-down arena driving game projected at large scale. Up to four players steer their cars using physical wheels, sharing a single space where survival and destruction are the only goals. The game is designed to feel noisy and immediate: crashes, explosions, and sudden turns make it easy for passersby to understand what is happening even if they only watch for a few seconds.
Exhibition View
Visual Style & Pixel Aesthetics
The game adopts a stylized pixel-art look that sits somewhere between retro arcade games and contemporary effects. Many base assets originated from the Unity Asset Store, but textures were repainted and visual effects retuned so that everything fits into a cohesive aesthetic. A key challenge was preserving a crisp, low-resolution pixel style while still relying on real-time 3D lighting. Materials, light rigs, and post-processing were carefully balanced so that highlights, shadows, and explosions feel dynamic without softening or blurring the pixels.
Look development
Crowd Simulation & Atmosphere
Around the arena, the audience in the stands is generated procedurally. Crowd positions are scattered in Houdini and then imported into Unity, where a simple random-action system drives cheering, reactions, and idle movements. This virtual crowd turns the game into a small performance inside the museum: visitors play in front of spectators who never leave, adding an extra layer of energy and context to the chaos on the screen.
Crowd simulation
Tower Defense
Concept
The Tower Defense game shifts the emphasis from reflexes to planning. Visitors place physical tower pieces on a table; embedded sensors detect their positions, and corresponding towers appear in the digital scene. As enemy units follow winding paths across the landscape, players experiment with where to drop towers to protect the stronghold. The tangible interface makes the rules of a tower defense game easier to grasp, especially for younger visitors, because strategy becomes something that is literally arranged on the table.
Exhibition View
Procedural Tools & Level Generation
To support quick iteration on maps, a procedural level-generation workflow was built in Houdini. Using a PDG-based setup, designers can sketch paths and regions inside Houdini and then bake out an HDA that Unity reads directly. From a single tool, the system generates:
-
terrain layouts for the tower defense arenas
-
spline-based paths that serve as enemy movement routes
-
2D masks derived from heightfields to control how different textures blend across the map
In Unity, these outputs allow designers to produce new levels rapidly. The paths define where enemies travel, while the masks are used to mix contrasting texture sets—such as light and dark ground—so that “path” and “background” remain clearly distinguished. PDG makes it possible to batch-generate many variations, turning level design into a series of experiments with difficulty, pacing, and readability rather than a slow manual process.
PDG workflow & 3D pringting
Visual Clarity & Strategy
The digital environment is viewed from above, with clear separation between enemy routes and surrounding terrain. Color, value, and motion are all tuned for legibility: where enemies come from, where they are going, and how each tower influences the field. Because placing or moving a physical tower immediately changes the configuration on screen, visitors can see cause and effect in real time, learning the basic logic of tower defense games through direct manipulation rather than instruction.
Houdini curve to characters following path