#industryproject

Challenge: How can I make a premade chat in a showcase room in order to prevent harmful sentences from users.

After having a sprint 3 demo with the client, we received feedback about the chat systems. We realized that if we let users type whatever they want, it might lead to some bad situations that will affect our target users (teenagers with autism). Because of that, I switched the chat to premade sentences so we can easily manage which kind of feedback that users can use.

How did I solve this?

I started this challenge by looking at which solutions can be a good choice to make a premade. I realized that Unity has a dropdown menu element, so I decided to use it. Then I looked at the Unity dropdown menu tutorial and documentation. I implemented it in Unity and showed it to my teammates.

DOT Framework methods used:

RESOURCES:

Unity UI Dropdown Tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URS9A4V_yLc

Dropdown Unity documentation:

https://docs.unity3d.com/2018.4/Documentation/ScriptReference/UI.Dropdown.html

How to access contents in the dropdown?

https://answers.unity.com/questions/1167834/how-do-you-access-the-text-value-of-the-dropdown-u.html

PRODUCT:

Users can choose a sentence in a dropdown menu then click enter to send the message.

In the beginning, I want to let users click on a sentence and it will send to the chatbox, but it keeps spamming the chatbox so I decided not to use it. Because my teammate did the chat function, so I decided to use both his textbox and my dropdown, I fetched the dropdown's sentence to the textbox, and then the users can press enter to send it.

I get the sentence using its value.

Quality of the results:

This is not lead to the "spamming" message error, the players now can chat using the premade sentences. But it also has some bugs, if a user press enter button right after choosing a sentence, the dropdown will toggle open and close, and keeps sending the message! I will try to fix it in the future.

NEXT:

Design Challenge

Design a 2D game that will help teenagers with autism to showcase their hidden talents. As of the moment, teenagers with autism have a really hard time believing in what they can achieve and are easily discouraged by a lack of self-confidence.

The target group is a mix of teenagers that are at school as well as some others that decided to stop. The feeling regarding school and studying is negative.

The game’s main goal is to help them believe in their achievements or yet to inspire them to follow their dreams.

Phases & Process (This will link to the relevant devlogs)

Analysis

Design

Realization

Validation

Reflection

How did I solve this?

This is a little bit difficult challenge, I needed to do some researches to find the solutions. I created some rawImage elements in Unity, then use C# to fetch the images in the local folder to the existed rawImage. For the edit function, I just add a script that loads the Canvas scene when the players click on each painting.

DOT Framework methods used:

RESOURCES:

Unity forum:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/how-can-i-create-image-from-image-file-on-the-hard-disk-and-display-the-image-in-image-ui.1044334/

https://forum.unity.com/threads/read-image-from-disk.117866/

PRODUCT:

The image is loaded to the array sequentially.

I make the file name of the paintings similar every time so it will overwrite the existed paintings.

The script to load the canvas scene:

Quality of the results:

This result is not the best solution. If the player has more paintings than the array created, then it won't show the paintings. We are still working to find a better solution.

NEXT:

Challenge: How can I implement the save function in our game in order to let players can save their paintings?

The players in GLOW can draw and express their ideas, and they can save their progress in order to show it in the showcase room or edit them in the future.

How did I solve this?

I looked for tutorials about saving the image file in Unity, and I found one tutorial about taking a snapshot using a Unity camera.

DOT Framework methods used:

RESOURCES:

How to make a snapshot using a Unity camera:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-56p770t0U

PRODUCT:

When users finish their drawing, they can click the "Save" button...

... a painting then saved in the local folder!

About the technique, I added one more camera and called it "Snapshot Camera" beside the main camera. A snapshot camera just renders the "painting" while the main camera renders the entire canvas (UI, buttons, color picker, etc.)

The SnapshotCamera.cs:

Encoding the file format, set file location,...:

Quality of the results:

The save function worked perfectly!

NEXT: