We are QuestLine a graduate student project run in Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology program. The team consist of Kimi Du (level and game designer), Ayaka Morito (game designer and 2D artist), Claire Zhong (UI/UX designer), Marsh He (3D artist), Jim Zhao (technical artist), Howard Hou (technical artist) and Samantha Trimboli (producer).Ruth Comley and Ricardo Washington are our project instructors and Ketul Majmudar is our subject matter expert.
Most of the first week, was meeting each other, understanding the teams strengths and weaknesses, and try to get a clear vision on the project requirments.
Project Goal:
Our goal is to create a level based off the Vampire Kingdom world book in the Rifts Series. The Rifts RPG is a tabletop role-playing game set in a post-apocalyptic Earth where magic, advanced technology, and creatures from other dimensions coexist. Players create characters like cyborgs, wizards, or mutants, and explore a world filled with dangerous factions, powerful enemies, and mysterious rifts—portals that connect Earth to other worlds.
During our first week, the team has spent time understanding Rifts gameplay and the multiple regions that exist in this universe. We each picked a world book that we were interested in, read through it, watch videos, and summarizes our findings. We then presented them to each other and narrowed it down to two worlds that we are interested in creating a level in; Atlantis and Vampire Kingdom.
Research:
Atlantis, takes from the Greek mythology of the lost island Atlas. Atlantis was a prospering technoloical city near the Bermuda Triangle that disappeared from history. In the Rifts universe, the city of Atlantis reappears because of the cerging magic on Earth only now it is not the same prosperous city. During Atlantis’ disappears it was conquered by Splugorthean Aliens. All of the Atlanteans have been enslaved and subjected to a mix of technological and wizardy-like experiments/procedures.
The Vampire world book is set in Mexico and overrun with vampires colonies. In this world, vampires are trying to summon their leader -the Vampire Intelligence- and take over Earth. The Vampire Intelligence is an alien that lives in another dimension. A group of vampire hunters – the Reid Rangers- are trying to stop this at all cost.
Next Steps:
In the coming week, we will be developing story concepts for each of the worlds we are interested in and present them to our Project Instructors/SME. In addition, we are going to create a goldspike to make sure we are understand the technical pipeline.