Inspiration
As many great (and not so great) things do, this started as a joke. Our entire team is physics majors and on the way here we were discussing physics simulations and the absurd assumptions we use to make our math easier to do analytically. The spherical cow is such a classic example of this assumption that the national Society of Physics Students gives out spherical cow stickers at their conferences.
What it does
Spherical Cow is a simple android game at it's base. You play as the cow and your goal is to hit "Schrodinger's Boxes" to collapse their wave functions to release Schrodinger's cat's; now either dead or alive.
The game is restricted to 2D motion and each level is designed around a cool physics gimmick.
How we built it
We started with just a list of physics things largely focused on either commonly misunderstood concepts or classical assumptions. We then broke apart what needed to be done. Laurel was the only one of us that had every used Unity so she started setting up the project and basic components we would need while the other two got caught up on the basics of Unity.
As workflow got started Matt's superior skills in scientific programming in combination with Winston's well rounded skills in math and physics allowed them to design the the levels themselves. While they were designing the levels Laurel built the interfaces and other framework of the game.
Challenges we ran into
Straight off the bat we had a decent learning curve because only one of the three of us was familiar with Unity. To make matters worse none of us had ever done any development for android before.
We also each had our own unique challenges to face. Winston didn't have as strong a coding background as Matt and Laurel. Matt, although he had the strongest programming background of the three of us, it's in computational science so he was a bit out of his element making a android game. Laurel, though not the strongest overall programmer, had experience in Unity working on Magic Leap, augmented reality, headsets. That said because the Magic Leap stuff is so specific she still wasn't anything better than competent with Unity.
Accomplishments that we're proud of/What we learned
We have an ugly, but functional app. For a trio of physics students none of whom knew a thing about android development we feel like that's a pretty big accomplishment. It's also an astonishing testament to what you can accomplish when you put your mind to it. We also learned quite a bit about Unity and C# from touch controls to prefab instantiation.
What's next for Spherical Cow
We'd like to expand on a number of the concepts we already have as well as implement more of the very long list of ideas we started with. Eventually we'd like to also get the app published to the app store, as well as work out the development for building on other platforms; notably ios, and a web hosted pc version.
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