We are back from Fall Break and we have a plan for what we want to make in the last half of this project semester.
Our ultimate goal is to make an experience that can run over the four hour course of the ETC’s Fall Festival ’25. For those who aren’t familiar, Fall Festival is an end of the year event here at the ETC that serves to showcase the work of the students in the program (so a lot of Building Virtual Worlds projects from the first years and a chance to show off the project work for the second years). It also happens to be the primary hands-on LBE experience that all students at the ETC are actually guaranteed to get (at least in this year 2025, I can’t speak to previous or future years), as the setup and running of Festival involves actually constructing and decorating a physical space to host an experience, and then facilitating the experience live for a continuous stream of guests over a fixed period of time. And so, it feels like a natural goal for us to aim towards.
In our team’s first Fall Festival, the Space Bridge served a rather simple function: it ran the same screensaver sequence that it had been up until that point, but there was a themed textbox on the center screens that announced that Fall Festival was going on. That served its purpose, but it did admittedly fall short of the amazing promises that the Space Bridge makes just by the very nature of its visual look. So, we want to try and use it to do something quite different for this upcoming Festival.
Considering the needs of Festival, what we came up with might seem a bit strange to some (especially those who are more ‘game-inclined’). Our general concept is this: An experience where guests are given the opportunity to create their own character that they send into a virtual city, which exists and develops throughout the four-hour course of Festival. They do not have direct control over their character (think the Sims, if you weren’t telling your character’s what to do, or something like Rimworld), but they can decide things like their character’s role, which dictate what their character will do throughout the city.
The goal of this design is to achieve an experience that is communal, quick to interact with, and motivates checking back in briefly whenever someone passes by. More of an art installation. I guess it’s also akin to those science museum installations where you can color in your own animal design on a sheet of paper and then scan it into a computer and watch a 3D model representation of creation join a herd of animals in a virtual space.
So, that’s what we’re working on now. There is a lot we need to do to achieve this goal. This week, we’ve largely been looking at character creation. We’re taking a 2.5D approach, where the world is a mix of 2D and 3D assets, with the characters being 2D sprites (ala Cult of the Lamb). Emily and Nina are collaborating to create 2D rigged and animated sprites using Spine that we can interchange parts for, and I have established the basic framework for creating combined skeleton meshes that are then linked to the character.
Of course, Festival is more than a handful of weeks off, and so we have a shorter-term goal that we’re aiming for instead at the moment: Playtest Day, which is next Sunday. We want to be able to run the character creator user interaction and some basic in-world character behavior during that playtesting event. So, lots of work to do before then!
Back to the grind.
Over and out,
The Intergalactic Buttoneers