Sagenverse is one of the projects I'm the most proud of in my career. When I joined the team, the idea for what Sagenverse could be was in place, but it was decided that the best thing for us to do would be to build a new version from scratch with the new team we now had, and that's exactly what we did!
I was responsible for leading the Unity-side implementation of the app, which meant that in addition to general gameplay systems, I also architected and coordinated communication systems between multiple frontends as well as a REST API backend. The collaboration on this project was one of my favorite parts, and finding the balance between when to delegate and when to get into the technical weeds was something I grew to learn.
The basic concept behind Sagenverse is to put creation tools into the hands of people who can't or don't want to learn a tool like Unity. It was primarily a Web-based app (with iOS and Android native apps) where you could create rooms, complete with your own files, furniture, 3D models, and audio. Once you have your room set up, you can create tours, quizzes, missions, and other engaging experiences for people when they visit the room.
There were many technical hurdles with Sagenverse that I'm very proud to talk about, but the biggest was probably the frontend setup. For accessibility and re-flow purposes, we didn't want to use Unity's built-in UI system, since screen readers can't access that the same way they can access made-for-web elements. Instead, we decided to host Unity as a canvas inside of a traditional web technology, first starting with HTML and then transitioning over to React. This worked extremely well and required constant coordination and collaboration, as each slider, button, or toggle switch meant at least one, but more likely two or three calls between Unity and the frontend to perform the associated action.
Click this picture to go to a Sagen that will take you through my experiences and tell you a bit more about me and the work I did at Sagenverse and other companies. It also doubles as a live demo of my team's work, so as you learn about what we did with this project, you can also experience it!
Once you've had a chance to look at the resume room, I highly recommend visiting our other website, the Chronosphere. We built several world-class exhibits to show off just how powerful the tool was.
