Plutonic

Background

Plutonic is a mental health services company pioneering immersive talk therapy and mental health coaching.

Development

At Plutonic, I assisted in the development of the primary teletherapy build within Unity. While extremely varied, all of my tasks were important in the polishing of our build to meet user expectations. These tasks incorporated a variety of Unity applications and other tools in their perfection. Here is a brief breakdown of a few of the implementations I accomplished:

• Incorporated a wide variety of lighting throughout the scene.

• Implemented and tweaked multiple assets, ranging in complexity and scope. These included perfecting their transformations, shading, materials, lighting, and audio, all within Unity URP and WebGL constraints and with the assistance of Unity Profiler and Google Chrome Console.

• Polished multiple attributes of the code, scene, and build to improve visuals.

• Optimized multiple assets and build settings in order to improve framerate and user experience

Although I was alone on the core development of all of my tasks for the most part, I worked directly alongside the founder/CEO and his team of experienced designers and developers when designing and perfecting my implementations. Through our use of weekly SCRUM meetings, Asana, and Plastic SCM, we perfected a detailed and strict project management cycle that drove everyone to do their best work and collaborate as much as possible. This proved extremely helpful for me when it came to this job being hybrid, as I had never had a mostly remote job before. This taught me better online communication and how to be more independent, as I did not have a manager or higher-up within close proximity to rely on like I was used to.

Constraints

As mentioned, I worked under the constraints of Unity URP and WebGL. This proved extremely challenging at first, as before this project, I had only developed smaller Unity projects with the built-in render pipeline and had only built for PC/MAC systems. Both the URP render pipeline and WebGL are extremely tricky to develop for and proved to be a steep knowledge curve. Ultimately, I learned how to efficiently develop for both through hours of study outside of work and trial and error.

I also had to better teach myself how to design and develop with other parties in mind, namely for the user of the project. Previously, my users had not been very complex; they typically were either college professors or other college students. While always on my mind during project design and development, they were never at the forefront due to their lack of complexity and importance when compared to how well I would have been graded on the project. Many of my past users were also in the same boat as me during development and could excuse some poor implementations more easily. That mindset had to change for this project. Plutonic has wildly important and complex users, from the therapists to the individuals paying for the session, and a lot of these users are not or may not be familiar with game development. Our project had to be of a very high standard in every way. Through counseling from my supervisor and testing the experience myself, I came to learn just how important user experience is within the real world. Developing for a college course project versus developing for a company with enhanced sponsor and user requirements is a much bigger difference than I could ever imagine. It was a wake-up call, but I persisted and became a significantly better designer and developer from it.

Takeaways

This was my first job within a field I am interested in and related to my studies. Working with James Shu at Plutonic proved to be an invaluable experience. I gained newfound independence via the hybrid nature of the job, better online communication, enhanced Unity experience and knowledge, enhanced knowledge on how to develop for the user, better understanding of how computer science/game design-oriented businesses operate and function, among a variety of other skills.