Building our product

Once our content was approved, we finally started building out the initial versions of our new applications. The project was done in iterations and we had 5 iterations to build what the client needed. 

Our first iteration was mostly focused on setting up the backend and connecting the many services together. We wanted the firebase to be the main connection between the two applications. We used their database and storage to do so. Before we would dove deep into using firebase to connect them like in iteration two, we use their user login to only allow admins to use our web application.

Iteration one was also spent really sifting through their Unity code as it was an extensive project by someone else, so we didn't make many changes at first.

The second iteration was more so building out the applications themselves as we had more experience. Although the picture shown below is our final structure of the database, in the first iteration we started by thinking of what it should be like. The database structure went through many iterations and we changed it many times. 

For example, we didn't know that each lesson pair of videos would need a name. We added that in iteration 4 when the client mentioned he might want different names when selecting what quiz to take. By the end of the iteration, they could build simple lessons and upload them to the database, but the unity application wasn't able to display them yet.

By the end, we had a basic lesson builder that would be able to upload the structure to the database.

This design is about half way through iteration 3. In iteration two, the calls had to be manually typed. The admin would be able to select videos and calls that were uploaded by them into the database. Once selected and the lesson complete, the admin could publish the lesson to the database.

Iteration 3

The third iteration is where things came together as we finally were able to make lessons and display them in the other application.

Changes we made and lessons we built throughout the web application would display in the unity application. There was an end to end connection between the two. The MVP of our product was fulfilled. Once we had this built out, it was really enjoyable to look at how far we had come. It felt as if we had really built something useful and were really becoming software engineers.