Adventures in Teamworks!

Bone
Bone
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

Bear Necessities — A Udacity VR Group Project

Background

Our team, Team Derezzed, joined the 5th round of Udacity Teamworks which is an event organized by Udacity that allows students to work with their peers to build a Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR) application. Each round of Teamworks has a theme. Round 5 had the theme of RISK. Students have only a month to design and build an application. Each team has 4 students. In our case, which is probably very common, none of us had ever met prior to this work. We are also located in various countries; 2 in India, 1 in the U.K. and 1 in the U.S.

The team: Sonia Wagner (U.S.), Charles Vulliamy (U.K.), Ananta Kumar Roy (India), Vivek Chand (India)

Mini Game Design Document/Project Process

Concept:

During our first meeting we were able to merge our various ideas into a concept very quickly. Our application, Bear Necessities, is an educational VR game that is based on real world techniques that hikers should use to avoid being injured or killed by a bear. It includes 3 different scenarios where the end user makes choices that will either increase or decrease the risk of injury or death. Our target audience are all those who are interested in hiking safely in areas where bears are present.

Practical matters:

Type of application: Virtual Reality

Platform: Android/Google Cardboard

Development software: Unity 3d, C#

Management tools: slack, google dropbox

Assets: We used some free Unity 3d assets but were also lucky to have a talented 3d artist, Charles, on our team. Charles created our environment and our fantastic bear.

Division of work:

Sonia: Management, Development, General Ideas

Charles: Artwork, General Design, General Ideas

Anant: Development, General Ideas

Vivek: Development, General Ideas

Lessons Learned

1) We all were enthusiastic about our product and the project as a whole, so one of the challenges we faced was making sure that we did not plan to build something that we would not be able to deliver in the allotted time.

2) We focused on using free tools for management. After reviewing various choices we settled on sharing our project on dropbox. We each worked on parts of the application, in general, Charles on the environment, Anant scene 1, Vivek scene 2, Sonia scene 3. Sharing the entire project on dropbox involved zipping the folder then uploading it. We communicated through slack regarding who was building which version so that we wouldn’t have versioning issues. It worked but was very cumbersome. We found that changing platforms (e.g. Windows to Android) within Unity would sometimes break things.

Conclusion

All in all it was a great experience in terms of getting to work with individuals that we have never met and accomplishing something as a team.

We invite you to take a look at the application. You can watch our video here.

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