Starlight Paladins

This project is a current work in progress, and is being made with using a combination of Unity, Blender, and OpenXR.

Based on my prior experience as a Computer Science curriculum developer and educator, I wanted to develop a VR programming environment that takes place in space, and promotes advocacy, sustainable science and collaboration.

You are an paladin out in space. You rescue aliens and their spaceship to help them survive attacks and damage to their spaceships. But, when you escort the Space Axolotl's to their home, whose ecosystem has been damaged by invaders, you must combine your skills as a scientist with the Axolotl's magical abilities to a new community.

So far, I have completed the storyboarding and prototyping the tutorial environment design, character design and animation. I am currently in the process of designing the code library, and the core functionality of each code block, completing the tutorial scene, and lastly, developing a set of environment scenes for users to explore the alien world.

I began the process of creating this VR app by developing a set of storyboards to map out the movement of the user throughout the environment. These storyboards are rough drafts and can be built on paper, in an environment like Canva or Miro, or using a drawing software like Procreate or Photoshop. Storyboards also promote community-based participatory design procedures, which are commonly used in Human-Computer Interaction contexts.

Once the storyboards are complete, I decided to develop a set of XR Samples to test out the functionality of the environment. A key mechanism in this game involves puzzling to put a damaged ship back together. In order to ensure that the XR Socket interactor was the appropriate component to fulfill this mechanism, and to ensure that a user only connected the correct pieces of the ship together, I built the following sample to test this mechanism before applying it to the main scene. This mechanism took me a week to figure out, and three days to fully implement into the main scene, with a spaceship.