frank731 / scraballs

Hack the North 2022 Project

Hack the North 2022

Inspiration

As students ourselves, we know that English classes aren't always the most fun. So, we set out to create a project that was both effective at teaching English and interactive. The purpose of this project was to also to help students in improving their skills such as multitasking and reaction time.

What it does it do

The game is built around basic scrabble principles - but with a twist. Believing that scrabble could use a little bit of 'spice', we changed the rules a little bit. Instead of calmly taking letters out from a bag, the letters violently hurtle toward you! Erupting from invisible cannons built by the invisible army in the invisible decades, the letters are back for revenge. So, arm yourself with your quest 2 and show those who is boss!

How we built it

We built our game using Unity, the Adhawk Meta Oculus Quest 2, and the Adhawk SDK. We began this project with a crippling lack of knowledge, however with a lot of help from Adhawk (Thank you Nick!!!), we were able to learn and build a game in VR. We started with basic ball and hand interactions, and built it into a real game. We put together a functional VR game through botchy hacks on hacks. By staying up until 5 am and mashing our keyboards we

Challenges we ran into

We ran into almost every problem imaginable, driving us nearly insane! First of all, we spent around 3 hours trying to establish a stable connection between the quest and a computer. Secondly, we could not get Unity to play though the headset. This led us to back to our savior, Nick from Adhwak (this guy deserves some serious praise). After gracefully guiding us through the Unity process we were finally making progress, building the game and making our visions come true. Until another problem came up. After picking up letters used to form words, the physics would go on vacation. After countless attempts at fixing the problem ourselves, adding 1 line of code fixed it. Don't we love game dev? Anyways, our last problem was fixing up our UI so it did not look like a junior high final project. Nick guided us through the basics of deign in Unity, teaching us enough for us to finish the project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

On Friday, no one in our group had any vr experience and through sheer hard work (and Nick) we were able to create a game that we are all proud of. We are proud that we were able to finish this project without having a single thought of giving up even with all the challenges we faced along the way, and we were able to face those challenges without failure.

#What we learned A key skill we learned this weekend was how to troubleshoot effectively and pinpoint our problems, albeit not quickly. Something else we learned was how to write effective code and how to integrate API in the Unity engine.

#hat's next for Scraballs Upgrading the UI/UX, working with Adhawk to improve eye-tracking, adding a reward system, and improving key game features by adding game modes.