Hey everyone! 
With professor @vcard's supervision and together with two colleagues (Eduardo Ribeiro and Sandro Gallina), we are working on a virtual world named "Christmas Village".
This project will have a main hub, the Christmas Village, with different activities/experiences/games:
• A main activity: collecting presents;
• Santa's Runner - An infinite runner game that will let the user collect certain number of presents if they reach specific points;
• Santa's Toy Factory.
Apart from creating environments, assets, working on the animations and UI, we will integrate scenes (we are discussing how we will take care of passing the information from one scene to the other).
For the collaborations, we are using Unity Teams (to serve as a version control) and communicate mainly through Skype (we have a specific group chat for that).
Here is a screenshot of the first import:
Figure 1. Unity - Screenshot of our first import.
We will continue to update you with further developments.
In the next couple of days we will also work on a website do help us share the project.
Best,
Gonçalo Peres (coordinator)
Eduardo Ribeiro
Nice!
Hey everyone!
The team has been working on it.
We already have a playable version of all the three activities, but we are fine tuning everything accordingly to the game design and requirements that we have established.
At this precise moment, we are doing some adjustments on the main hub (speech bubbles and interaction that will lead to changing between scenes) and on Santa's Runner.
Figure 1. Unity - Team working in two projects right now.
We have been learning a lot in the process. Some curiosities that may be useful to you:
• As we have different activities/scenes that together make up the final project, we thought that working on each of them in separate Unity projects and then importing a package to the main project in Unity would be the best approach, specially in terms of performance. We have noticed that it doesn't make that big of a difference. Given that, now, we only have one project outside the main collab project - and maybe tomorrow will be in the main project as well.
• When working together on the same scene with Unity Teams, make sure you have a Revision Control Diff/Merge (we used WinMerge and Meld) so that you can select on different files, which ones you want to keep.
Talk to you soon!
Best,
Gonçalo Peres (coordinator)
Eduardo Ribeiro
Hey everyone!
The project is looking really amazing as the time goes by and the team members join their efforts.
On our hub (the Christmas Village), the Santa can interact with some characters:
Figure 1. Santa interacting with the elf.
In those interactions, the Player is able to join some activities/games: Santa Runner and/or Elf Factory.
On the Santa Runner it is only missing the Counting and Displaying the score.
Figure 2. Santa Runner.
We are working on a Main Menu, that will feature, in other things, our social media channels.
In the meantime, if you feel like following us on Facebook, we will leave here the link: https://www.facebook.com/ChristmasVillageXR/
Talk to you soon!
Best,
Gonçalo Peres (coordinator)
Eduardo Ribeiro
Looks fun, congrats!!
Hey everyone!
We have built all the scenes and we will be tweaking them and and a couple more features, such as sounds.
I will show you some screenshots of how everything is looking:
Figure 1. Main Menu.
Figure 2. Hub/Christmas Village.
Figure 3. Elf Factory.
Figure 4. Santa Runner.
During the next days we will be working on our website and social media channels.
We will be releasing this solution for WebGL and will consider on implementing it for mobile in time for the next Christmas.
Stay tuned for the final release - expected for the next week.
Best,
Gonçalo Peres (coordinator)
Eduardo Ribeiro
Hey everyone!
We just shared, in the Tutorials, scripts and code section, a workflow that we applied to this project: Using Auto Serialization in Unity Editor to improve project design workflow.
As one can read in that thread, our project is almost ready to go live - we currently working on the reports and on the website.
I will keep you posted!
Best,
Gonçalo Peres (coordinator)
Eduardo Ribeiro
Hey everyone!
The moment we worked really hard for it is here.
Our website is live [https://christmas.goncaloperes.com/] and you can use it to test our themed virtual world [https://christmas.goncaloperes.com/christmas-village/].
Figure 1. Website - Christmas Village.
The Christmas Village targeted to children between five and thirteen years old [Show it to your kids/nephews].
This virtual world integrates different activities trying to achieve a cohesive and immersive experience. The activities were chosen with the aim of providing a diverse range of experiences unified into the same main goal of “saving Christmas” by collecting the missing presents.
Figure 2. Santa waiting for your help.
Let's see who is the first one sharing an image of the victory screen [Challenge Accepted?].
Best,
Gonçalo Peres (coordinator)
Eduardo Ribeiro