Lightship VPS Challenege

Two months in the making, I have finally published my submission to the Lightship VPS challenge!

This is my biggest project so far. I’ve learned a lot from executing this project. In the beginning, I didn’t know where to start, I had the vision of the end product and no idea how to build it. Then Lightship Maps Beta was launched, I got to test beta 2 of the maps and it was exactly what I needed for my project.

At some point during the project, I found out about chatGPT and started asking it to teach me write some simple codes. Like how to use a dictionary? How does ray cast work? How to detect a sequence of buttons? It was like talking to a mentor who gives me detail explanation, examples, and doesn’t mind me asking every two minutes. It was an invaluable tool for a beginner like me. There are some answers that are not good or doesn’t work, but that’s why human is still needed to catch it. For beginner basic things, it is very capable.

So combining Lightship maps and VPS, the full game at multiple location was possible. If you look at my GitHub commits, here were my steps:

1. Strip down maps example
2. Strip down remote authoring sample
3. Spawn objects on maps
4. Create game manager to carry location ID from map scene to remote authoring scene
5. Make remote authoring scene take location ID and load saved anchors
6. Field test #1 – initial VPS locations didn’t work due to poor gps, location moved
7. Create UI for top and bottom menus
8. Start first location, purchase asset from unity store, place them, code puzzle logics and interactions.
9. Field test
10. Repeat for second, then third location.
11. Add more things to better player experience: map spinning icon effects, fountain effects, credit screen.
12. Final field test
13. Demo video and submit.

You can see my submission below:

I will take a few days break, then get back on making some finishing touches and publish to App Store.

Wish me luck on this competition 🙂

‍