Design Lead, UX Designer, 3D Modeller
Core Team,
Techniche,
IIT Guwahati
July 2020 - Sept 2020
Covid-19 brought unprecedented times to our college life. Virtual classrooms made it very difficult to connect with people. As a part of a college fest, we took up the task of bringing people together and giving them a shared experience that they can look back upon.
The result was a virtual replica of the IIT Guwahati Campus where people could come together and explore all the easter eggs and installations. The application was developed using Unity and was live for over a month, with a digital footfall of over 5000 users.
The college campus has an crucial role to play in any student’s college life. But, in 2020 Covid forced all of us to go virtual. We were thrown the curveball of experiencing college life without actually being in college. So under the pretext of Techniche, our student driven Tech Fest, I gathered a team of 6-7 designers and we started exploring different ways we could bring the campus to every student’s home. The result of which was an rudimentary metaverse of our college campus, filled with small interactions based on our college life where people could come together and explore the main four buildings. I had the pleasure to lead and develop this experience with a talented group of designers and developers.
We looked at several online and offline experiences that we could replicate and take inspiration from. This created a moodboard of sorts about the visual language as well as the interactions that could be added. The portfolio website of Bruno Simon served as the biggest source of inspiration for the kind of interaction and styles we could deploy.
No one in our college had explore the game development ecosystem until then. Our approach was to come up with practical ideas and then learning the tools required to make them a reality. Our design team had the opportunity to explore low poly 3D modelling and creating virtual installations. The development team had the chance to learn Unity and creating multiplayer web applications. The main goal was to use this project to learn as much as possible and diversify our skill set.
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Creating a replica of our campus was the easy task. Making sure it piqued interest and provided entertainment and retention was the more challenging part. The limited size of the area helped us map out a user journey throughout the virtual space. We made sure that the user is rewarded for exploring the area. These ‘checkpoints’ were catered to very specific areas that they were located in.
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For example, in real life our lecture halls were always packed with cycles. So in this virtual campus, you will get access to a bike to speed up your travel. You could also hear music as you went near the Auditorium, playing the greatest hits of rock bands that have visited our college.
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The models were specifically created in a low ploy style to make the process faster and keep the web experience light and economical on any systems. The main four buildings were created with the help of a lot of reference photographs and some details were even added from memory. Some assets were picked up from free 3D libraries. (ironically not our actual library)Moving forms and setups like the Newton’s cradle, created installations that filled up the open spaces across the grounds. It allowed us to explore form in a previously unthinkable medium.
A lot of work (and even more fun) went into sprinkling easter eggs throughout the space, to make it our own. These were very contextual to our college experience, be it the food truck that stayed open late in the night, or the leopard hiding in the woods just like one did in real life. These small, mostly static places helped us attach more emotional and vibrant core to the environment. It’s these moments that we cherished in real lives, that we could reminisce and bond over with our friends.
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We added a leopard, since our campus was frequented by them
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This was the foodtruck which satisfied our late night cravings
The project got an overwhelmingly positive response so much so that we had introduce a timeout for people playing over 10 mins. This journey was never to create one specific product, it was to learn, explore and create experiences that could bond us in a very difficult lockdown phase. I truly believe that it were these emotions that helped us create something genuinely beautiful and something I am proud of creating till today.
Check out more gameplay clips here ->
As we navigated through this journey, I learnt the importance of scale. One should know when and what to scale back, and what to add scalability to. Controlling these parameters and knowing when to let it take a wild turn is key to creating products with emotions.
