Welcome to my new website and my blog, New Adventures in VR. Other REM fans out there will recognize this as a play on the title of their brilliant, 1996 album, New Adventures in HiFi (thanks for the inspiration – and the memories – Stipey et al). I obviously don’t expect this blog (or any of the creative endeavours described herein) to match the quality of that little gem (or anything else in REM’s rich back catalogue), but a little bit of aspirational marketing does no-one any harm. And, what I lack in polish and creative genius, I hope to make up for a little in passion, persistence, and a willingness to try new things. All of which I hope to share in this blog, as a record of the ups and downs, lefts and rights, and dramatic about turns of a scientist deciding to pursue something creative for the first time as she approaches her 40th birthday.
On Saturday I took (and passed, thankfully) the Unity Associate Programmer certification exam. This has been a bit of a goal of mine since I started this adventure a little under 12 months ago, and it is a bit strange to finally be able to tick it off the list. This website has also been a goal of mine, and I’m a little bit embarrassed that it’s taken me so long to get here. The delay has partly been thanks to my initial confusion with using WordPress (I thought I’d made a bad choice for a while as I stared at the WordPress site, utterly ignorant of how to start, having already paid good money for hosting and a domain name), but mainly it has been thanks to my inability to commit to it, favouring instead spending time on building my project, taking more courses, and playing around. But I finally pulled my finger out (turns out WordPress isn’t that scary after all) and here we are, ready to go public with my ongoing journey towards educational XR world dominance. Or something.
There are lots of things I’m working on right now, but since I’m only getting to this a year in, I should probably provide a little bit of a summary of how I got to this place, now – the rest can come later. You can read a bit about me and how I came upon XR in the About Me section of my website, but I wanted to take an opportunity to record the last year in a bit more detail – mostly for my own benefit, to remind myself how far I have come, because in March 2021, if you’d have told me that in a year I would be learning how to build inventory systems and discussing colliders and rigid bodies and technical game play mechanics while watching my husband play Elden Ring, I would have looked at you quite quizzically. I knew nothing. I had played around a little bit with programming in C while I was in university, but crunching numbers to predict melting and crystallization temperatures of volcanic rocks is a far cry from building video games. But, I’ve never been short of gumption, so I was fairly optimistic when I started Circuit Stream’s 3-week introductory short course on C# and Unity that I would be able to figure it out. I think I was probably hooked after about a week. All we did for the course was make a simple 2D clicker game where you clicked on Muffins and cookies and other sweet treats, scoring points as you went, but it was so flipping satisfying to create something -in code – that works, and can be interacted with. I know that there are ways to use Unity without the scripting, and Unreal Engine (as I understand it) uses a much more visual approach to programming, but there is something about using a lines of text to make objects move and respond and interact – I don’t think I’d enjoy it as much without the scripting.
After I’d finished the C# course, I moved straight onto the 10-week XR Developer Course. It’s a project-based course that jumps into building scenes and coding game mechanics pretty quickly, so I was really glad I had done the intro course first. We learned about building simple environments, controlling the movement of objects in our scene, setting up our “XR Rig”, controlling player locomotion in VR, and a bunch of interactions (including building menus) by building things like a solar system with a spaceship that fires lasers, a VR painting game, a VR foodfight game (complete with burger gun), and a final project featuring a bunch of blobs (Ichablobs) that are trying to take over a castle (you have to fight them off with a frying pan, among other random “weapons”).
Throughout the course, we also had the opportunity to work on a personal project with a mentor (this used to be a standard part of the course, but I think it’s an add on now). This is the project that became Elevator to the Centre of the Earth. At the beginning of the course, when I first met my wonderful mentor, Dr. Ashley Godbold, I had a long list of ideas about projects I wanted to do, all of which had something to do with earth science or the process of science. I like to dream big, so it was not too surprising when most of my ideas were met with a gentle but firm “I don’t think that’s a reasonable goal for this timeline and a beginner”. We came down to a couple – Elevator to the Centre of the Earth and a science-based interactive mystery, but given that I didn’t have the time (or the skills) to put together the complex narrative structure required for the latter, we went with the first one.
The premise for Elevator to the Centre of the Earth is pretty simple: you ride on an elevator through the layers of the Earth, stopping at various levels where you complete activities that help you learn about the Earth and the tools geologists use to build models about the structure and processes of places that we can’t look at directly. As I write this, I think the development of this game is enough to take up a post of its own, so perhaps I won’t go into too much detail here. Suffice it to say that I have been working on it since April last year and while it started off as “not my favourite idea but the only game I can reasonably expect to build”, it is turning into something I’m pretty excited about. And, as I have continued to add and refine functionality, I have learned (thanks to some great resources on Youtube and some very reasonable Udemy courses) how to do some 3D modelling in Blender, make textures and materials in Adobe Substance 3D, do a bit of video editing, make UI elements in Inkscape, and even build a website! I have also had to combine my educator and earth science hats to design the levels themselves, and think about what I want people to get out of the experience and how best to get them there. And honestly, that’s what I find so engaging about all of this – I get to combine visual creativity with educational creativity, with science, and with technical problem solving, so it keeps all bits of my brain active in one way or another. I look forward to learning more and creating more and writing about it.
It’s a beautiful day here, so I should probably go out and enjoy it. Cheerio!