Group Project work for Udacity VR Nanodegree

Udacity’s VR Nanodegree program has an option for Virtual Reality team projects where you get to create VR content while working with other students from all over the world.

This is a story for the teamwork project we did whilst undertaking the Udacity VR Nanodegree. The theme is “ CHANGE”. My team, Team 2600, consisted of 4 people coming from different background and time zone, scattered around New York, San Francisco, Mexico and Lagos. Together, we worked on a team project to deliver an amazing VR game.

What Is Resource Balance?

Resource Balance is a mobile VR game that challenges players to balance the growth of cities against the environmental consequences. Mining natural resources allows the player to build cities and increase wealth, but each city’s prosperity also depends on access to clean water and fertile land. The player wins by maximizing the combined prosperity level of all cities on the map.

The Background

The theme of the project is CHANGE. Our first thought was a concern about a creative way to implement the theme in our project. How do we design/develop with CHANGE in mind? What are we going to do with this theme? Lots of ideas came up.

Selection Process

We had about 4 different ideas, to begin with. We evaluated each of these ideas by asking questions like:

1. Is it related to the theme — CHANGE?
2. How big is the scope to build within a given time frame?
3. With the ideas coming in, do we have the skills to bring the one that will make the final selection to live? Finally, we ended up merging different ideas when we realized very quickly that majority of us had ideas relating to climate change. That’s how we ended up with resource balance.

Tools

Unity Collab and Github

We used Unity Collab and Github for collaborating on code.

Slack

Slack was used for our communication

http://www.kpcb.com/companies/slack

The Process

Selection Of Idea

We had about 4 different ideas, to begin with. We evaluated each of these ideas by asking some questions before deciding on what to build.

Assigning Roles

Each team member was assigned a role in the project. Someone was assigned to take care of the code, another person was assigned to take care of the documentation, another was assigned to manage the 3D assets while the last person was assigned the role of creating/designing the sounds.

Working On Assigned Role

Each team member worked on their assigned task and pushed to the repo while we all test as the development went on.

Putting it all together

At the end, we did something. Everyone on the team worked in one way or the other to bring the project to what it is now.

The Result

Next Step

We hope to add more features and possibly push the app to the store someday.

Conclusion

This is a great step in the right direction for all four of us on the journey of VR development and working in a team.

The game was a lot of fun to make — especially because of such a dedicated and hardworking team. It’s amazing that we can make something this intricate when none of us have ever met and don’t live in the same country!

We learned a great deal during this teamwork project. Most importantly, we learned to collaborate, appreciate each other and had fun.