Developed in Unity, using C# and Oculus VR SDK.
Meditation Station is a relaxing Virtual Reality experience, built for the Oculus Quest 2 using Unity. Meditation Station is meant to invoke a feeling of magic and curiosity by whisking you away into an environment unlike any other all while bringing you into a state of tranquility.
I worked as the programming lead on Meditation Station. I handled menus, interactions, optimization, and design. I also worked as the manager of other programmers and designers on the team, with tasks such as facilitating communication between artists and programmers and teaching and supporting teammates with GitHub version control.
Getting Meditation Station to run well on the Oculus Quest 2 at times was a challenge. It required me to learn how to use the Unity Profiler and decrease draw calls and GPU demand as much as possible.
As with all interactive media, Quality Assurance was necessary to make Meditation Station comfortable and enjoyable. I played a major role running playtests for our experience. Often new bugs or ideas were found through playtesting and it was my job to lead the programmers and designers to tackle those revelations.
I handled a large portion of lighting and visual effects. A keen understanding of Unity's particle system and lighting engine was necessary to keep Meditation Station's visual style consistent and appealing, while also not too taxing on user's eyes.
Movement, menus, and some interactions in the world required knowledge of Oculus' OVR Input plugin and C# scripting. Prior to Meditation Station, I knew very little about developing for VR.
My biggest challenge in developing Meditation Station came in the form of balancing my duties as a Programming and Design Lead and my responsibility of creating features for the project.
Prior to Meditation Station, being a leader seemed out of reach for a relatively laid-back individual like myself. However, over the course of a few months I found myself to be capable of leading, not by making demands, but by being compassionate, informative, and encouraging to the team I had control over.
At the same time, I learned many new things as a developer. I learned how to properly use Unity's profiler, Oculus OVRInput, Menu Management in VR, and VR interactions through the power of C#.
