--- title: Building Hexagon Sphere Using Animal Crossing-Inspired Trick description: Indie studio UNSUNG, developers of the turn-based tactical roguelite Tile Crawl, explained how they created a hex-covered sphere for the game's... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/building-hexagon-sphere-using-animal-crossing-inspired-trick-lf4r2oyaj twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Building Hexagon Sphere Using Animal Crossing-Inspired Trick | daily.dev og:description: Indie studio UNSUNG, developers of the turn-based tactical roguelite Tile Crawl, explained how they created a hex-covered sphere for the game's... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/building-hexagon-sphere-using-animal-crossing-inspired-trick-lf4r2oyaj og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/lF4r2OYAJ.png og:image:alt: Building Hexagon Sphere Using Animal Crossing-Inspired Trick og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Building Hexagon Sphere Using Animal Crossing-Inspired Trick **[80 LEVEL](https://daily.dev/sources/80lv)** · 3 min read · 4 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary Indie studio UNSUNG, developers of the turn-based tactical roguelite Tile Crawl, explained how they created a hex-covered sphere for the game's meta-progression map using a shader trick inspired by Animal Crossing. Instead of building an actual sphere (which can't be evenly tiled with hexagons), they use a flat plane whose vertices are bent in a shader based on camera position, with rotation achieved by moving the plane rather than the camera. Additional challenges solved include recalculating normals for correct shadows and using a big sphere collider combined with backward coordinate mapping to detect clicks on nodes. Some issues remain, including VFX support and water wave artifacts at plane edges. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How do you make a planet covered in equal-sized hexagons in a game since a real sphere can't be tiled with only hexagons? Fake it with a flat plane rather than building an actual sphere. Vertices on the plane are recalculated in a shader based on the camera's position, bending the plane so it visually reads as a globe; every object on it must share the same bending logic or shader values to stay consistent. Rotation is done by moving the plane along X and Y while the camera stays fixed, with looping planes teleported across edges to simulate wraparound. _Developers wrestling with similar shader tricks can find more indie breakdowns like this on daily.dev._ ### Why do shadows break when you bend a mesh's vertices in a shader without touching the normals? Shadows and lighting look wrong because vertex normals still point in their original, unbent directions even after the vertices themselves are displaced in the shader. Fixing it requires recalculating each vertex's normal by taking its two neighboring vertices, bending them with the same logic, and deriving a new normal from the results, which also enables correct shadowing from objects like clouds above. _daily.dev surfaces shader deep-dives like this one for developers debugging their own lighting glitches._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [This Sphere Holds Entire 3D Gaussian Splatting World](https://daily.dev/posts/this-sphere-holds-entire-3d-gaussian-splatting-world-vobkwpeht) · 80 LEVEL · 2 upvotes · 0 comments - [Hidden Trippy Side Of Animal Crossing: New Leaf's World](https://daily.dev/posts/hidden-trippy-side-of-animal-crossing-new-leaf-s-world-rnikg1pt1) · 80 LEVEL · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#game-development](https://daily.dev/tags/game-development), [#gaming](https://daily.dev/tags/gaming), [#unity](https://daily.dev/tags/unity) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/building-hexagon-sphere-using-animal-crossing-inspired-trick-lf4r2oyaj) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Building Hexagon Sphere Using Animal Crossing-Inspired Trick","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/building-hexagon-sphere-using-animal-crossing-inspired-trick-lf4r2oyaj","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/building-hexagon-sphere-using-animal-crossing-inspired-trick-lf4r2oyaj"},"datePublished":"2026-09-02T14:04:44.668Z","dateModified":"2026-09-02T14:32:48.131Z","description":"Indie studio UNSUNG, developers of the turn-based tactical roguelite Tile Crawl, explained how they created a hex-covered sphere for the game's...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/ba986a6d8893a6e03d1b2a160944edd6?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/ba986a6d8893a6e03d1b2a160944edd6?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"80 LEVEL","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"80 LEVEL","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/78eebcd76c154e6bbfd565fed7dc4093","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/80lv"},"commentCount":1,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/building-hexagon-sphere-using-animal-crossing-inspired-trick-lf4r2oyaj","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":4},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":1}],"keywords":"game-development,gaming,unity","timeRequired":"PT3M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"80 LEVEL","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/80lv"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Building Hexagon Sphere Using Animal Crossing-Inspired Trick"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/building-hexagon-sphere-using-animal-crossing-inspired-trick-lf4r2oyaj#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"How do you make a planet covered in equal-sized hexagons in a game since a real sphere can't be tiled with only hexagons?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Fake it with a flat plane rather than building an actual sphere. Vertices on the plane are recalculated in a shader based on the camera's position, bending the plane so it visually reads as a globe; every object on it must share the same bending logic or shader values to stay consistent. Rotation is done by moving the plane along X and Y while the camera stays fixed, with looping planes teleported across edges to simulate wraparound. Developers wrestling with similar shader tricks can find more indie breakdowns like this on daily.dev."}},{"@type":"Question","name":"Why do shadows break when you bend a mesh's vertices in a shader without touching the normals?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Shadows and lighting look wrong because vertex normals still point in their original, unbent directions even after the vertices themselves are displaced in the shader. Fixing it requires recalculating each vertex's normal by taking its two neighboring vertices, bending them with the same logic, and deriving a new normal from the results, which also enables correct shadowing from objects like clouds above. daily.dev surfaces shader deep-dives like this one for developers debugging their own lighting glitches."}}]} ```