Orbital (CP2106: Independent Software Development Project) is the School of Computing’s 1st year summer self-directed, independent work course. This programme gives students the opportunity to pick up software development skills on their own, using sources on the web.
Apollo 11 (Highest level)
We aspire to integrate freshmen into the SoC environment in a fun and interactive manner through a mobile game that simulates the SoC campus.
Adapting to a new environment is always a daunting experience. The large campus and independence demanded of university makes it even more challenging.
In addition, SoC students present and future will face more changes in the near future as the increasingly large cohort sizes poses several challenges:
- Short duration of orientation activities not adequate to familiarise completely
- Inability to accommodate all students in orientation activities due to resources constraints
- Expansion and transformation of campus with the building of COM3
- Freshmen who are unable to or do not wish to attend orientation activities face greater difficulties in orienting themselves.
We are motivated to develop a mobile game, SoCiety, to provide a virtual representation of the SoC campus in order to allow freshmen to integrate themselves in a fun and interactive manner.
A mobile game set in an isometric representation of the SoC campus where SoC students create personalised avatars to explore and interact with the environment.
Mini-games relating to and featuring content from SoC modules will be found around the campus in classrooms.
Multiplayer functionality including leaderboard for games allows users to compete with others.
- Firebase
- Unity
- Sign up authentication for personalised user experience
- Choice of avatars
- Movement and animation of avatars
- Isometric representation of COM 1 including basement, level 1 and level 2
- Creation of an interactive and informative environment
- Development of mini game to share more about COM
- Leaderboard functionality to compare score standings among others
To improve the UX and UI design of our application, we tested our prototype with incoming SoC freshmen to gather feedback regarding the game.
From the interview with 12 freshmen, most of them felt that the game’s graphics were well designed and allowed them to be more familiar with COM 1.
However, some felt that they would be bored of the game rather easily and recommended more features to be added into the game, such as allowing the avatar to interact with objects in the game to obtain information regarding the different facilities that are available in COM 1.
We took the feedback from the SoC freshmen into consideration and included additional features to make the game more engaging in the long run. The avatars are now able to interact with objects such as the printers to obtain information regarding the printing quotas for SoC students.
- Accurate illustration of buildings