Velawoods English
English courses designed with interactive and immersive learning experiences, aligned to internationally recognised qualifications from Cambridge University.
Velawoods is an educational first-person game devised jointly with Cambridge University Press and Learn Direct, featuring a 3D world in which the user interacts with its characters through speech analysis software provided by Carnegie Speech, and completes various mini-games carefully designed to go hand-in-hand with English coursebooks.
A number of English courses for different levels are available to download as modules, and, at the end of each, the player receives an internationally recognised certificate of completion. Velawoods is available on Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices. To find out more about the educational game, check out its official website.
Developing Velawoods
Stack:
Unity | C# | Visual Studio | SVN | Jenkins | iOS | Desktop
Velawoods was my very first professional career step after university, in 2014! I was lucky to time it just right - when I joined the company, we were only 2 developers who
kick-started the project and set up the initial scaffolding.
Eventually the team grew to about 30 developers, artists and designers, as new courses had to be developed in
parallel, and aiming for a release in 2015.
- Developed and maintained Velawood’s timeline-based dialogue system and its user feedback
- Implemented the speech analysis software, in collaboration with Carnegie Speech, USA
- A large number of in-game activities and gameplay mechanics
- The main menu and the player’s in-game profile features
- Ensured a smooth collaboration between developers and artists, as a technical artist
After release, we had over 20.000 users providing feedback in the first few months, and we were regularly delivering fixes and new content. In 2016, with the game being well received, I decided to leave UK and travel, settling in Bucharest where I got to work next on Black The Fall.
