B3 Bachelor A Spirit Tale  

Team

  • Bartholomäus Berresheim
  • Juri Wiechmann
  • Marie Lencer
  • Nima Azimihashemi
  • Nuri Son
  • Pauline Röhr

Supervision

Prof. Dr.-Ing. David Strippgen
tech stack visualized
Our tech stack

Unity & Oculus VR

The Project was presented as an Oculus Quest VR Game in Unity from the very beginning - and we were quite happy with these tools. While some of us already had some experience in Unity, we still took our time to get to know the engine properly. Oculus offers an Integration Package for Unity, which helped us to get started with VR development. While the Oculus Quest is not the most powerful VR headset, there were many instances in which we were glad to be working with standalone VR headsets that did not need to be plugged into a PC. However, as of recently, Oculus VR can only be used with a Facebook account, which was unfortunate because we had to share our credit card information to get a developer account, and we partly had to share accounts, since some credit cards were not accepted. We also ran into compatibility problems with Oculus support on MacOS, which slowed down development and testing. Nonetheless, the overall work with the Oculus Quest was a positive experience.

GitHub

Many of us had little to no experience with Git at the beginning of this project. Luckily those with more experience were able to help and recommended useful tools to learn Git. We also decided on a Git workflow at the beginning of our development and documented it in our repository to avoid at least some merge conflicts and risk losing our work. We used GitHub over any other tool since we wanted to share our code publicly. Since we are using paid assets in our game, we have shared our code in a separate repository, which does not include the mentioned assets. We made a lot of use of the review functionality in GitHub, because we had decided to do code reviews on all of our pull requests.

Maya & Blender

For some of our ideas we could not find any free or affordable assets that would suit our needs perfectly. So we created them ourselves first in Maya, then in Blender. We started with Maya because we already had some experience with it thanks to the IMI 3D-Design course. However we realized, that the support and help provided by the community is way more active on Youtube with another 3D-Modeling software, Blender. So we started to use Blender and achieved some satisfying results.

Project Management

Our main communication tool was Discord, where we had multiple text and voice channels to share resources, discuss tasks and hold team meetings. To organize our tasks we worked with Trello where we had one board with multiple lists – one for each step of the development. Each task was assigned to at least one team member and we added labels to mark the importance and urgency of a task. If there ever was the need to write something down, such as our game concepts, the game story, and meeting protocols, we used Google Docs for it. This way multiple team members could work together at the same time.