At Draw & Code, one of our ambitions is to support people who are looking to develop on their XR immersive skills by offering a placement with us to work alongside our talented team.
During his gap year, James Comer did a week-long placement with us, building on his knowledge and programming skills in Unity. Find out what he got up to during his time with us.
Q. How did you come to work with Draw & Code?
Since I’m doing a Virtual and Augmented Realities course at university next year I was very keen to get a work placement in that field, especially since I had no prior experience in it. After looking at the Draw & Code website and at some of their past works, I could tell it was a great company and exactly what I was looking for.
Q. How was your experience working with us?
I’ve really enjoyed my time here. Everyone was very friendly and would be happy to help me with problems I encountered. They all made me feel like one of the team. It was really interesting being involved in the daily stand-up meetings every morning and seeing how a company like this functioned.
Q. What did you work on?
I created a VR program in Unity to run on my Oculus headset. I had no idea of what I was going to create when I started it, so I just went along adding any new features as they came to me. It ended up becoming a simple program to drop a ball down onto some planks. I will be sure to continue working on it after my work experience has ended to try and turn it into a functioning game, possibly with the goal of getting the ball to fall into a hole by orienting the planks.
Q. What did you learn from the experience?
At the start I had no idea how Unity worked. I’ve learnt how to set up Unity so that it’s able to run on a VR headset, how to give objects different kinds of properties such as gravity and their bounciness, how to create a pushable button and code a script to perform a task when the button is pushed. All of these will be very useful starting University next year.
Q. What’s next for you?
Next year I will be moving to Bournemouth to do the Virtual and Augmented Realities course. But before then I intend to expand my knowledge in Unity and continue to make more programs, whether they’re in VR or just a 3D game to be played on the computer.
