Now that this project is revived and somewhat stable, I will be fixing issues, updating, and getting it to a stable point.
After that I will likely:
- fix all the random stuff
- update unity and wwise to latest LTS versions
- add more content/features
- focus on fun
- clean and organize the F out of this project
- this project had a wiki, right? hahahahaha.... :/
////////////////// Note: Everything after THIS point in this README is from May 2023 and will be updated at a later point. //////////////////
This is the main repo (most current branch is sprint7-MAIN) for the SKI GAME Capstone project for Bellevue College's Team Tiger Shoes, contracted with MXT Technologies. This project is a first-person, cross-country, adventure VR game, designed 100% for quadriplegic accessability made by 7 students during a two-quarter long capstone program. It is still in progress, but was called "done" at the end of the program, as that was the scope of the exercise.
I am personally continuing this project because I believe it is a really cool project that I want to be able to show off and share, perhaps even release if it gets that far. But, for now, is simply slated to be a proof of concept and showcase of skills of the original students.
The original four application-development students (from a class of ~30) were made a team and strategically paired with an outside company by our professor (in our case, MXT Technologies, out of Seattle, WA) and met with MXT to see what sort of application they needed us to develop (as this capstone project was a replacement for a traditional internship). We met with MXT and over the course of a few weeks, worked out that they wanted the few separate teams of students that were also paired with MXT to find a person with accessablity needs, interview them, and come up with a VR project that could help them somehow. We were given legal contracts to look over and sign, and at least one teammate required negotiations and learned to rewrite contracts for copyright ownership of some original content. My team (Team 4, "Team Tiger Shoes") then had meetings with city officials and veteran representatives, and eventually found, and worked with our contact, a young guy who suffered a very serious injury while playing sports and now suffers from permanent quadriplegia. We interviewed him as a team in a series of Zoom calls, and eventually settled on developing a game that he, and children that are hospital-bed bound for long peroids of time, could play to not feel stuck in a hospital - to get away from being physically stuck in a place.
We later "hired" four more students from other disciplines into our team: three Digital-Media-Art majors (all DMA students interested were sophomores with only Unreal Engine Experience) and one Business-Intelligence major (also a senior).
Initially, as the final team structure was solidified, our scope was quite large. As time went on, we realized that three months in, an education environment wasn't giving any of us enough time (almost everybody taking full loads and had very different schedules) and we ended up having two separate major scope-reductions.
On the last day of the quarter, all of the different capstone teams (about 12 total) presented their experiences and whatever they had, on campus, in place of taking a final. Since this was during COVID-19 lockdowns, this was the first time basically any of us had ever met (teachers, students, and clients).
Since everybody went their own way after, this project has been stagnant in a buggy state between June2022 and May2023.
The initial four developers ended up settling on a first-person, cross-country skiing game with stretch goals of adventure and RPG progression, and despite being conscious of the risks of VR sickness, we deliberately made the game have a focus on visceral movement. The game itself is a first-person adventure game with few mechanics that takes place in three main scenes: a sunny snowy valley with a lake and a small town and blue skies (the hub area), an endless windy forest maze past the valley, and a cave system with a boss encounter. The movement is done with a single two-axis joystick and a single button (mappable to an Xbox controller), around the functionality of QuadLife’s "QuadJoy" controller. There were supposed to be a lot more features, but we quickly reached the final day, and everybody moved on.
NOTE: The game was originally designed with a much, much larger scope, with many features and ideas, and those have been put into a backlog document. The original Jira project page and accounts, all along with the project plan we used while while actively developing (between Janurary and June 2022) have all been wiped and are gone. I have done my best to archive as much documentation as possible of the development over the course of this project.
The game is being developed in Unity 2020.3.29f1 and Wwise 2021.1.8.7831. We had a Wwise edu license through AudioKenetic, but those are now depricated and replaced by a superior licensing system (as of 2023).