Voyagery

Inspiration

We were inspired by games like Papers, Please that explore the challenges and hardships of the U.S. immigration process. We wanted to place players directly in the shoes of someone going through that process, and we felt that VR is the ideal medium for that kind of experience.

What it does

The experience places players in the shoes of an immigrant seeking United States citizenship. They go through the naturalization exam, answering U.S. civics questions, and are also asked a number of personal questions about their motivation for seeking U.S. citizenship.

How we built it

Voyagery was built in Unity. We used the Meta Presence Platform to implement gesture-based input to interact with the game.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a number of early developmental hurdles, particularly when it came to developing a VR experience on Mac. Our entire team uses Mac computers, so testing proved difficult, as tethered VR testing generally doesn't work properly on Macs.

We were also new to the Codeberg version control platform, so there was also some learning to do when it came to understanding how it stores code and integrates with Unity and Github.

Many members of the team were new to VR and Unity development, so there were a number of growing pains when it came to learning VR logic in Unity. Core interactions such as gesture-based input proved difficult to implement, though we managed to get them functioning for the final product.

And as always, scope and ambition proved to be large hurdles. We weren't able to build everything that we had envisioned, so we had to make some tough early decisions (and some later ones as well!) about what to cut from our submission and what to keep.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We managed to develop core gameplay that we believe is fun and engaging. We also learned a lot about developing VR games for Meta headsets using Unity.

We are proud that we managed to create a playable demo of our original concept, given the number of developmental hurdles that we faced.

What we learned

Through researching for this project, we learned quite a bit about the U.S. citizenship application process. We learned how involved it is and how arduous it can be. We also learned a great deal about what motivates many people to immigrate to the U.S.

We also learned a lot about developing for VR. We learned that developing and testing on Mac is difficult and not ideal at the current point in time. We learned that VR development, given the relative infancy of the medium, is very difficult. It's best practice to expose oneself to VR development environments to gain exposure before sailing the treacherous seas of VR hackathons and game jams.

Most importantly, we learned the value of teamwork and collaboration. Even in challenging times, communication and camaraderie are key in getting a team across the finish line.

What's next for Voyagery

Despite the challenges we faced, we are proud of what we've built, and we believe that the foundational concept is strong. We would love to continue building the concept out in the future, as we believe that it fulfills an important humanitarian need.