Journey into the Uni-Verse

Interview Prep mini-game
Sample customization after accumulating some points
Another sample customization
Checklist
Program Personality Test mini-game sample result
Program Personality Test mini-game
Menu Screen
Title Screen

Inspiration

One of the first things we learned about each other was that we come from diverse places. Some of us come from countries that take 20 hours to fly to, while others live across Canada, and some are local to the GTA. While one may believe that the distance would separate us, the truth is that a group so diverse can come together and create a project to alleviate our shared experience of stressing over post-secondary applications. The bigger truth is that post-secondary applications affect incoming students very differently. Being a first-generation student, not knowing anyone familiar with the Canadian education system, or never stepping foot in Canada are all contributing factors to the struggle of managing post-secondary applications. We created Journey into the Uni-verse because we want to help incoming students with the stresses of applying to post-secondary, from those who simply want a little help in navigating their applications to those who need this support the most.

What it does

Journey into the Uni-verse utilizes the comfort of games to deliver educational and personal information to incoming students, in order to better prepare and inform them about post-secondary applications. It contains several mini-games, including a personality quiz to help the user navigate potential programs, an interview prep game with a custom score based off of the user's response, and a detailed check-list to ensure that the user feels prepared. All of these aspects are tied together with a rewards system. The user receives a certain amount of points depending on the mini-game and their performance, which is then used to unlock a variety of clothing options for their custom character. Clothing options include hats, shirts, and pants into order to motivate but also alleviate stress off of the user.

How we built it

Using Github to collaborate over Unity, we made several scenes that referred to each page and mini-game in our project. Two members would work on each mini-game together, by taking turns implementing use cases with scripting in C#, and hand-drawing a unique and friendly UI.

Challenges we ran into

Prior to NewHacks, we had little to no knowledge of Unity or C#, which of course lead to a learning curve of figuring out how to correctly use Github to collaborate and how to use C# and Unity.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

While using a game engine we don't know and coding in a language we aren't familiar with was a risk, we wanted to use NewHacks as a learning opportunity and to try something new.

What we learned

We learned a lot about GitHub/Github Desktop, using C# in Unity, and how to structure assets in Unity to create a working game.

What's next for Journey into the Uni-Verse

Journey into the Uni-verse will see new updates to how it evaluates users' answers in the interview prep mini-game, a more-in-depth personality quiz depending on users' answers to better help them choose a major, and have more clothing options. It will also see an option to tailor the game to international students vs. domestic, to deliver a personalized experience to the user.