Paula Santa María

Summary

CaleidoMar: La Jaiba is an immersive educational experience where you take the role of a young Homolapsis plana (chilean crab) and explore its ecosystem, meeting species it interacts with and finding other crabs that teach you how to live as one of them.

Engine: Unity
Platform: PC and VR (Oculus Rift S)
Role: Team Lead, Programmer, Game and UI Designer
Team: Teresa Muñoz (Design & Art)
Dominga Parraguez (Design & Art)

In-game images

Card manager menu

Cutscene

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Ideation and outline flowchart

Team Lead and Programmer

Programmed and implemented all the systems required, such as character movement, card collection management, menus and cutscene triggers.
Adapted systems for both PC and VR experiences.
Integrated all assets in Unity while prioritizing optimization for a lightweight project.
Coordinated the team, assigning tasks to each member and met project deadline.

Game and UI Designer

Researched chilean marine ecosystems and ideated the game's narrative.
Made a prototype of the area and planned the location of species and cutscenes.
Designed the main mechanics of the experience, with a focus on exploration.
Adapted the design of UI menus for both PC and VR.

What went well

By communicating efficiently, trusting each other's judgement and leveraging each other's strengths, we successfully met the deadline and achieved a remarkable result.
The cozy ambiance and focus on exploration worked really well with the character movement decisions, making players feel like a crab by walking sideways and was an overall fun and new experience for them.

What went wrong

Due to the tight deadline and heavy workload, we decided to create a mid-game demo, rather than the full experience. As a result, players found themselves navigating without a defined end-goal or a clear path to follow.
As a university project, we had several responsibilities alongside it. Consequently, some team members began work ahead of others, resulting in the need to re-create certain assets. This consumed time meant for polishing and addressing other unfinished tasks.

What I learned

My confidence in my game development abilities and familiarity with the tools grew significantly, especially considering that this was my first experience in developing a video game.
The prototyping and iterating stage is crucial to any game or project, we should've taken more time to make sure the game goals were easy to understand and follow before jumping to the production stage.
As a designer and programmer, I learned a lot about Unity, 3D and VR development.