Office Configurator

Randstad

Helping Randstad Office Managers design and plan out their office spaces, featuring a Sims-like building experience.

Purpose

Randstad had been rapidly growing and trying to expand their site locations to help an ever growing amount of individuals dependent on their services to find jobs. To maintain their look and feel across all of their satellite offices, they needed a custom environment to plan their offices out, so they could quickly move in.

Responsibilities

This was my last project with D-TT. Together with our Game Design lead, we came up with a solution to host a complex data structure that would allow the users of this platform to customize the location they store content on within a 3D space, as well as the 3D spaces themselves.

The interface is similar to how one would build The Sims images, placing walls and furniture on vertices in an open plane. Just like in The Sims, you cannot rescale furniture, so the furniture has to be picked accordingly from a vast library of furniture options, measured, and placed within the 3D space. However, other elements, such as the wall height, the window height, and other non-furniture related items can be customized, and as such becomes more variable as it goes. When an item is placed within the space, their vertices are stored in a matrix format in the backend.

We realized quickly that the backend for this experiment needed to have an extremely loose JSON storage, akin to MongoDB. However, the rest of the content all needed our flagship CMS to manage, such as the details of where the office is located, the Office Manager of said office space, and further options.

Due to the complex nature, we ultimately signed off on a hybrid solution, storing complex data in a document-storage environment, for which the IDs would be tied to our CMS to handle who gets administrative access and to what degree.