Beautiful Mind – VR App
After development bootcamp I found myself in Eventbright and Meetup developer circles. One of those circles was concerning VR development. I decided to dive in head first and in the process learned how to make mobile games, AltSpace worlds, VR development, and VR publishing. In the end I made a VR app with a small group of developers.
The Idea
I joined a group with an initial idea of creating a productivity app for ADHD users. This gradually transformed into an app that would train ADHD users valuable life skills that they can use in their everyday lives.
Research
One of our group members suffered from ADHD. We were able to ask him a variety of questions to get us started with our research. We naturally moved on to doing our own research and found some very useful information in these areas...
- Many users that attended the Nuerodiversiy Group in AltSpace were helpful in communicating their everyday problems that disrupt their lives.
- The Ultimate Time Management Toolkit: 25 Productivity Tools for Adults with ADHD and Chronically Busy People was a great resource for creating productive challenges for the game.
- Many scientific white papers helped us find other similar games that have been developed. This way we avoided making something that had already been developed and also learned from other's research.
Development
After designing our storyboards for the game and gameplay we needed to work as a group in building out the scenes we designed. In order to do this we used Github so that we could all build things together while in different parts of the world. Here are some things we learned along the way...
- Learned to build 3D environments in the game engine Unity and code with Unity in C#.
- Used resources like the Unity Asset Store and SketchFab to find models.
- Coded animations and interactions into the gameplay.
Publishing
Publishing happened to be a completely new experience for all of us in the group. All publishing is controlled by Meta and we needed to comply to all of their starndards. Along the way we learned to...
- Publish an app to the App Lab and invite others to our app to that they could play and review it.
- Create a variety of marketing assets that accompany the app on the App Lab website.
- Distribute the application via App Lab and by delivering APK files to users with unique headset issues that prevented them from leveraging App Lab like the rest of us.