Building Virtual Worlds
A major part of the initial semester at CMU ETC is the class named Building Virtual Worlds. In this class, students with different backgrounds are put into teams of 4 to 5, where they work together to build simple games within 2 weeks. This page documents my input in the projects I was involved in.
Hottie’s Cream is aniuce-cream shop simulation that focuses on recreating the action of scooping ice cream. Each team received a Xbox Adaptive Controller set to build a game for, as well as a prompt in the form of an everyday action that the game is supposed to teach/recreate. There was a strong emphasis on modifying the controller into a unique physical interface that lends itself to capturing the activity.
Hotties’ Cream
Physical interface
First iteration of customer sprites
Final customer sprites
Deer Stranger
Deer Stranger is a short VR escape room experience. For myself and many other students, this was our first attempt at creating an VR experience.
Character color map, iterations
Character model posed
Character model
Props
I Only Have Eyes For You
I Only Have Eyes For You is a 2-player collaborative obstacle course game using eye trackers as its input system. This game was developed within 1 week.
Sprites, UI assets
Kingdoms
Kingdoms is a 4-player competitive strategy game developped for a physical platform at the ETC called the Jam-O-Drum. The platform involves a horizontal, circular surface that displays projected content, as well as four sets of drum-wheel combinations situated at the four cardinal directions around the surface as input devices for the players. Additionally, a new technology being developped at the ETC lets the four players each see a different view, by having the projector rapidly cycle between 4 different images, as well as having the players wear special goggles that flicker on and off, so that the wearer sees only 1 out of the 4 sets of images being projected. Based on this technology, our team designed a strategy game where a “fog of war” blocks different areas of the map for different players.
Models, iterations
VFX