Islandmade
Islandmade
MSc Creative Digital Media 2017
Barry Healy, Jan Ní Fhlanagáin, Jocelyn Murray-Boyne
Islandmade was a collaboration between myself and two of my colleagues from DIT MSc Creative Digital Media. It was developed in Unity 5.3 for iPad. It was released to TestFlight in November 2016 and was submitted for appraisal in mid-December 2016. It is recreated here in WebGL and hosted on itch.io.
The Story of Islandmade
Islandmade began its life in a very different form. Originally titled Makers, our first prototypes focused on the story of a jewellery maker on the island of Skyros in Greece. It was intended to use the capabilities of Unity and the iPad as our chosen platform to tell diverse, interweaved stories of the Maker, his tools, materials, inspiration and culture, as he designed and created a particular item of jewellery from silver.
The plan initially was to make extensive use of video and interactive elements in order to surface multiple branching stories, trigger interaction events and small games within the app. The multi-stranded narrative was modelled in Twine and our UI development went through many iterations in the period between February 2016 and May of the same year. We underwent State of the Art and Competitor Analysis, User Modelling, Prototyping and Testing.
We also created this promotional video to detail our interface and prototype in more detail.
Makers was an ambitious project from the start. We were developing our project scope and early prototypes and testing at the same time as we were starting to learn Unity. We intended to add many new features and media to the project and to have an in-depth and many stranded narrative to our subject.
We also experimented with 3D models of our subject created using Autodesk's 123D Catch software which worked remarkably well, especially considering it was a reflective object. I had created a small prototype touch interface for allowing you to pan around and zoom in and out of the model (since lost due to a hardware failure) to house this feature.
Another element included an interactive panorama of a workshop to explore. This was done using the Google camera app to create a full 360°, single plane panorama which was applied to the inside of a cylinder created in 3DSMax. The game camera was then placed in the middle of the cylinder and simple UI buttons were used to pan the camera on a flat axis left or right. We had hoped to use it as an interface in order to explore the workshop of our Maker, however in the final product this element was removed as we were unable to gain sufficient access to a Maker's workshop in the course of producing Islandmade.
This interface uses on screen UI buttons to control the camera, given further development this would have been replaced with a simple swipe and drag mechanic to move the camera.
Islandmade: The Saga!
In the course of creating Islandmade we hit many roadblocks and bumps and came up against some severe limitations of the Unity engine at the time.
One of our prime contributors had agreed to work with us early on in our research, however they would later become subject to a heinous and brazen copyright, IP and trademark infringement in a national paper which, justifiably, lead them to become less supportive and quite suspicious of our motives and the project we were working on. We therefore had to change tack sightly in relation to this and develop workarounds and shift focus slightly onto other content and features we could tie down and rely upon.
Building with Unity version 5.3.4 we ran into issues with video support on mobile devices (which is now a feature of Unity 2017 ), as well as problems with our asset pipeline and generating assets that worked best with Unity. Building our app out to iPad became particularly taxing with our development period coming right as Apple released significant and highly impactful changes to xCode and the iOS platform. This increased our time to build and delayed testing of new features and changes we were delivering based on User testing. Our build/test/refine/build/test cycle became protracted and unreliable due to issues out of our control and we had to roll back to previous branches of our build on a number of occasions to try and rescue our project files. We worked through each problem, reached out to Unity, various User communities, forums and groups for advice and workarounds and eventually worked through our issues and came out the other side in enough time to complete our prototype.
Islandmade was an ambitious project taken on by a well organised and talented team. We hit issues common to many and found work arounds and fixes on our way to completion. It was released to TestFlight in November 2016 ahead of schedule both for our project and our College submission requirements. We then went on to submit the Final Build to iTunes in order to receive feedback on what we would need to further complete development, only for it to be passed and released to the store. Without further support or development available after the end of the development window we felt it best to remove it and so it is no longer available online.
If you are interested in learning more about our project and the process we underwent our Final Project Document is available below.