Adventures with Zeee Bucks

🌲🦄🍋🍭 Based on a book from Ally, Adventures with Zeee Bucks is an AR app + physical piggy bank that teaches kids about financial literacy through interactive storytelling in Augmented Reality.

I love working with Joy Tien. I say it every time: Working with Joy is a Joy! 😊

I think this was Joy’s first realtime project as CG Lead, and her enthusiasm for learning Unity and nailing the realtime workflow is my favorite memory on this project.

Welcome to Planet Zeee

Adventures with Zee Bucks is an iOS and Android AR app built using ARFoundation in Unity. Kids can use a specially-designed AR Marker Piggy Bank to explore Planet Zeee, a world dreamed up by Ally to educate kids about money. Follow the protagonist, Emma, as she earns, spends, and saves money with her new friends, the Zeee Kids.

Learning with Augmented Reality

Each side of the Piggy Bank teaches kids a different lesson about financial literacy. Tapping on ‘Emma’ plays an animation lesson as she guides you through your lesson. Tapping on props and scenery brings the world to life for hours of fun and exploration.

Each AR lesson ends with a giant, digital coin going in or out of the piggy bank (depending if Emma spent or saved money)—connecting the digital world of Planet Zeee to the physical piggy bank.

• Emma makes Zeee Bucks at the Lemonade Stand 🍋
• Invests with the Money Tree 🌳
• And spends it on Unicorn Rides! 🦄

The app was designed to be super simple for kids to use, with an in-depth tutorial section that lets parents help teach their kids how to explore Planet Zeee on their own.

Team Effort

On this project I set up the scenes, scripted the UI, scripted user interactions and onboarding, did extensive tracker testing, and orchestrated each scene using Unity’s Timeline.

Shout out to Kellan Cartledge for setting up the scaffolding for the project, including packing each scene into addressables, and especially for setting up a good shader workflow to follow—baking all maps into RGB channels. And big thanks again to Joy for setting the groundwork for a realtime asset workflow that would be built upon in lager projects.🌻

One of the most challenging aspects was optimizing—especially for Android. MeshBaker was essential for reducing drawcalls and maintaining performance.

This was one of those projects where thankfully target tracking worked great throughout the process, which translated to the final printed box. Thanks to everyone who worked on Adventures with Zeee Bucks! It was a fun project.

Credits.