Personal Reflections

 Personal reflections

Dorin Chira 297125

During the semester I worked on four projects. 

I enjoyed working on all four projects. On the first project I liked how easy it was to set up the project, though we did not use GitHub, that's why we had confused and could not combine the project correctly. Hadi made some awesome turrets, that could rotate and shoot and I could not integrate them into my part of the project so I used only a part of his logic, and then we had to move on to the next project. I did not like that we had no knowledge of Unity and were frustrated when we could not do simple things.

The second project I liked doing not because of what it ended with, but what I discovered about AR in general. I learned how easy it is to set up. How I can easily connect to Firebase and fetch data and models to show in AR, and not oversize the app memory. The only thing I did not like in the second project is the project itself, it felt too generic for me to be proud of it. And we also didn't use all the features of AR that I wanted to try and test as we had to start the third project.

The third project I liked because when developing it we started by learning the basics, and we were doing fun stuff like throwing cubes 3-4 times the size of ourselves into the air and throwing them at a distance of 50 meters competing with who can throw the farthest.

The fourth project I like because we started creating a first-person shooter and base prototype for a zombie shooter, two things that I very much like. I learned how to set up a scene and prototype the terrain, though we did not use it so we can bake Navigation for bots faster. I did not like that we started by trying to make a magic game where you will defend from waves of enemies. But could not choose a good framework and tutorials to do all that we wanted in time. Every time we got stuck on something and we were wasting a lot of time.

In the first project, we had the ambition to do something great and it ended up crushing of our lack of Unity knowledge. For the second project, we were more conservative in what we wanted and what we have done. And it was the same for the next project, the third one. The fourth we tried again to do something ambitious but we did not have all the knowledge and practice for it. The most difficult part was to decide what to cut out of development.

The only regret I have I did not spend as much time as I wanted to, as other lectures demanded from me a lot more time.

I think if we had Game Dev before XRD it will be a more delightful experience.  

The time spent during the projects felt easy and exciting, the feeling of:" here are the tools, feel free to do whatever you want to do" got me in the same mood of discovery as in childhood. It was a fun and delightful experience overall. 

I do not know if I would have done something differently. If I had the time I would watch more tutorials before starting the projects, but it's a luxury that we cannot easily afford. So next time if I would start a project I would give myself more time on exploring and researching.

Hadi Abdalla 299110

During the XRD course I have worked with my teammate Dorin across multiple projects.

On our first project we developed an application that generates animated soldiers that will take a certain path, these soldiers were being generated on an image that was placed in real life that would simulate the flow of the application, I have worked on making the turrets and the movement of them, which was quite a challenge because when the head of the turret was rotating, it was rotating from the center of the head which caused a very weird result, but the solution was creating a point of rotation, not in the center of the head but the point of contact with the body. Both Dorin and I had our parts working as expected but making them work together was quite difficult, especially when we merge code between computers.

During the second project we developed a simple AR application where balloons would be simulated in the environment provided, and the user would try to shoot down the balloons. It was quite interesting to connect external data to the application and display it in the application. I still saw a lot of features that I wanted to get my hands on but did not manage because we started the VR project.

In the third project, we kind of got around the basics of what we are doing, and it was quite fun to work on especially that when we got to testing. We faced some obstacles through developing this project, for example, when the ball would go behind the body the user in the application would move a couple of meters upward, which would force the user to reset if he wishes to continue playing properly. Still this project is more polished and enjoyable from our two VR projects.

The fourth project was the most interesting project during this course, as we created a first-person shooting game, something I really love to do, the game revolves around the user defending against spawning zombies. We managed to set up a terrain for the game, and weapons the user can, as well as being able to use two weapons simultaneously, we had a vision of creating levels in the game where it would get harder with time, as well as stories, to create a proper user experience. In retrospect maybe we were better off, doing a markerless AR project, maybe one that fetches information from an external database, as we already had the expertise, and everything is easier to set up.

I would say it was a great experience in this course, especially since this is becoming such a big industry, one with countless opportunities and ideas that could be brought to life at a relatively reasonable price.

Though I believe we could have accomplished more in this course, if we weren’t pressured by other courses as much, but on the other hand as a team of two people, I think we have pushed ourselves as much as possible. I am glad I took this course and will recommend it to my peers as the one I had the most fun and was the most relaxed.