Will Henniker

Maps to students, are not the most interesting of things, but undoubtedly, to get the most out of their student experience they will need to be comfortable navigating the area, finding the cheapest super market (and pubs!)

To address this, the University of Gloucestershire gave all new students a tea towel with a stylised map printed on it, on top of this, they also commissioned an interactive version of the tea towel map, with the intention of it being available in one of the campus’s open spaces such as open learning spaces or students union.

As a small development team, we set out to recreate the art and map in an interactive format, with myself working to create the functionality of the map within Unity 5, and my colleague creating the 3D assets.

At first, development stated with the rapid creation of a vectorised road layout combined with white boxed 3D landmarks to accurately test locations in a 3D space. Initially I created an implementation of an A* path finding system for the player but after playing testing, we discovered that players would try to navigate “off map” breaking the intended experience.

In response to this, I responded by removing the A* pathfinding system in favour of a simpler node based system. The system detected the closest node next to a touch input and moved the player to that location, allowing a degree of freedom whilst keeping the player from going out of bounds.

After implementing all of the assets in collaboration with our artist, I created some finishing polish for feel including moving clouds a hot air boons and even small sound ques that played when the user reached an individual location.

A pop up text box was also added to show the player the area of the map they had arrived at.

After the final playtest, the interactive map was deployed to several touch screen devices and web browsers and released to students.

The project was a fantastic way for students to engage with exploring the campus and area and at the time, was a great excuse for me to explore developing for touch screen devices, creating user experience and programming patterns in Unity such as A* pathfinding and Message busses.