This week, our main focus was preparing for the Final Presentation and the upcoming ETC Festival. Our efforts centered around refining the player experience, finalizing our physical setup, and stabilizing the technical system for public showcase.
Festival Setup & Player Experience (Art & Production)
To enhance the Festival experience, we created a set of custom stamps and printed map booklets for players. Each stamp represents a key scenic location in the world. As players pass through each location, we place a corresponding stamp in their booklet, encouraging exploration and making the experience more engaging and memorable.
We also added additional decorative elements around the space to better frame the installation and support player immersion during the Festival.
Tech Update
-Rendering Issue Resolution
One of the biggest technical challenges throughout the later weeks of development was a severe rendering performance issue on Meta Quest 3 headsets when running on ETC machines. From Week 11 onward, we tried nearly every debugging solution we could think of — but nothing worked consistently. The breakthrough came the night before Soft Opening, when the project was tested on a personal PC at home, where it ran perfectly smooth like previously mentioned. This confirmed that the issue was machine-related, not caused by our project.
During later debugging, the school IT team observed the different behaviors across machines and confirmed that the issue was not coming from our content or engine setup, but from a deeper system-level conflict. On early December, one of alumni joined the debugging effort. With his help, we identified that the issue was likely caused by a weird interaction with the Meta Quest 3 driver.
As a result, we made the decision to switch our Festival headset to the Valve Index and apply additional system adjustments. By the end of that day, the project was finally running smoothly and reliably on our machines, allowing us to lock down a stable Festival build.
–Foot Tracking Decision & Control Design
Another major technical focus this week was finalizing our movement control solution. To support different shoe sizes, we tested using accelerometer and gyroscope modules instead of pressure-sensing insoles. However, this data proved to be unstable, and individual differences in walking styles made the results inconsistent. We tried averaging the data stream, but the control still did not feel reliable or intuitive.
After extensive testing, we concluded that hand controller input remains the most stable and comfortable solution for player throughput, especially in a high-traffic Festival environment. As a result, for the Festival showcase, we made the final decision to use hand controllers instead of foot tracking to ensure a smooth, accessible, and comfortable experience for all players.
Final Presentation preparation
For our Final Presentation, we centered it around what we have learned throughout the semester, not just what we have built. We began by sharing that this project has been a long process of experimentation, iteration, and problem-solving, and that our goal for the presentation was to showcase both our final experience and the learning journey behind it.
The presentation focused on four main topics:
–design
– art
–rendering
–foot tracking
These four areas represent the major challenges we continuously encountered and worked through during the semester. Rather than only showing polished results, we explained why we made certain design decisions, the problems we ran into, and the solutions we tested and refined along the way. Through this structure, we hoped to clearly communicate both our creative intentions and our technical growth as a team.
