Time Frame: Apr 14, 2017 - Apr 25, 2018
SojournVR
The one thing I will forever tell a college student wanting to start a software startup before they graduate will be - don’t.
I started development of SojournVR with my younger brother and two friends the fall before the Spring Semester I was supposed to graduate. Initially there were only four of us working on the project and between all four of us the years of experience we had developing for VR was, well, zero.
My friends John, Dan, and myself learned to develop for VR through SojournVR. We just downloaded Unity, Blender, and Visual Studio one day and started plugging away. For months, it was all we could thing about. We would go to class, and immediately come home and work on the game for hours on end. We would geek out to the progress we made, figuring out new ways to implement something, learning tips and tricks regarding Unity, C# or Blender. Eventually we started a vlog of our progress.
In April of 2017 we formally filed for an LLC - Vixonix Studios. We found a nice cheap office space to rent out and began working on the game every waking second of our free time. Most of us held part time jobs to fund the project, but outside of the part time jobs, we were all pretty much dedicating full work weeks to SojournVR. We got to showcase the progress at some group meetings for startups within the Madison area, continued making vlogs, and eventually we were able to setup a store page and get the application hosted on Steam servers.
We continued to learn, grow, and develop the game until we were finally able to release it in the fall of 2017 in early access.
The majority of the work I contributed to SojournVR was within the UX and interaction portion of the game. I did try my hand at 3D modeling within Blender for a few objects, but programming was what really drove me. The greatest accomplishment for myself was the conceptualization and developing for the entirety of the inventory system. It was a small magical cube that follwed you around and would attach to your hip. When you wanted to interact with the inventory you could just grab it and toss it infront of you where it would open up. If you walked away from it, it would auto-close and then lerp back to the users hip.
I also did work on some of the Postgres DB we used and how that interface with the Unity 5.6.3 application, however, most of that work was done by John. Learning UNET and getting all the networking appropriately configured was by far the greatest hurdle for John and I.