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

Shown here is the setup for Hottie’s Cream. We augmented the buttons contained in the Xbox Adaptive Controller with a constructed cardboard workstation, as well as a real ice-cream scoop. Specifically, the scoop was configued in such a way that, the player needs to be physically pressing the scoop against a button that represented an ice-cream flavor, in order to “start scooping” by holding down a trigger attached to the side of the scoop.

Shown here is the first iteration of sprites for customers. In this stage, the focus was primarily on conforming to the chosen color palette of the game, as well as corresponding stylistic choices with the other artist on the team.

Shown here is the second iteration of sprites for customers. In this stage, I focused on creating 3 separate groups of customers with different overall dispositions. This was achieved by giving each group unique theme colors, facial expressions, and types of objects their apparels are associated with. This was done in order to correspond with the game design chioce to have 3 different types of customers that require different levels of eye contact when serving them ice cream.

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.

In this project, I focused primarily on digitally modeling and texturing life-size, interactable objects.

Iterating versions of digitally painted texture maps for the human figure.

The figure, textured and posed.

Modeling a human figure in Maya.

Various other objects modeled at roomscale, some interactable and others for set dressing purposes.

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.

For this project, I designed and illustrated a variety of sprites and UI elements.

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.

In this project, I initially focused on digitally modeling pieces representing the player actions. With the platform, there was the challenge of having the models presented in a top-down view, as well as the extremely low resolution caused by the 4-way display scheme.

Iterations of the models for the caravan and the catapult. The models were strategicallly distorted to be visually clear and interesting when viewed from above.