Game Designer
title: SA Power Networks - Virtual Reality Substation
created: 2017
development time: 8 days
team size: 4
engine: Unity
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In November 2017, four students from AIE were awarded a work placement at SA Power Networks for five weeks, two days a week. With the first two days being taken up with induction and LIDAR scanning, that left us roughly eight days of actual development time.
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SAPN had a bunch of ideas that they wanted to tackle, but given our short amount of time, we had to concentrate on a few small ideas so that we could get as much done in the time as possible. We decided on developing teleportation, destination teleports, door opening, image display and a movable/scalable tape measure, which measured both vertically and horizontally.
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As the project team leader I was responsible for making sure our target was achievable and that everyone was happy and moving in the same direction. With a team of one programmer and three designers, it was always going to be tough.
My personal contribution was working out how to bake the scene we were given into one mesh so that it would actually run within Unity, and provide a smooth frame-rate in VR. (The initial scene given to us was fully comprised of the most ridiculously detailed CAD models!) I then implemented all the functionality which had been created into the main scene, as well as setting up the different times of day.
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All in all I think it was a great effort by the team that we managed to get so much done in so little time.
