PxlJam 2017

On the weekend of 15th of September, 2017, I trekked up the hill to Victoria University to take part in PxlJam, a game jam that is organized by the university. Most people had already pre-arranged their teams, but I was fortunate enough to find another talented programmer to pair up with for the weekend. Since there were only two of us, and I had more background in art, I took on the role of creating most of the 3D models used in the game, while also doing a bit of coding as well.

For this jam, I was particularly keen on making something using  augmented reality in Unity3D. Prior to the weekend, I had done some experimentation of a few different AR systems and decided upon using Vuforia as it had the most user friendly debugging system. It was extremely convenient to just be able to connect a webcam via USB and use that for testing within the Unity editor.

Over the course of 48 hours, we managed to create a small puzzle-box type game with a couple of levels. It mostly worked, and people seemed to enjoy playing it via an android tablet. It was a fun learning experience and I’m looking forward to trying it again and improving on the skills I’ve learned from this experience.