This week will be a short blog, as most of our team flew to San Francisco to attend GDC (Game Developers Conference) 2025, where also showcased Spelunx at the ETC booth. In addition, our Producer Yingjie stayed in Pittsburgh and coordinated with South Fayette in preparation for next week’s Digital Promise Conference there.
GDC
Since CAVERN is huge, and cannot be brought to GDC to showcase as experiences on other platforms, we focused on showcasing our toolkit introduction video that we submitted SIGGRAPH and included our extended abstract summary on the side as a handout for people who are even more interested in learning the technical details. Overall, we gauged the interest of experience design professionals, as well as educators across all levels.
Digital Promise Preparation
Digital Promise, in partnership with the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), will be happening at South Fayette on Tuesday. It is an event that will bring educators and school administrators from across the United States to Pittsburgh to learn about the innovations happening in the school, and CAVERN will be one of the core showcases South Fayette will present on that day.
In addition to the Tuesday event, ETC’s Outreach and Engagement Networking Coordinator, Anthony, informed us that around 20 AASA visitors are scheduled to visit the ETC on the day before Digital Conference to learn about our department as well as our partnership with South Fayette — Spelunx will again be a core part of the tour!
Roadmap of Learning
Earlier this semester, as part of our collaboration with the Game Development Course at South Fayette, we sent a Unity + CAVERN Roadmap of Learning, which we spent time refining during spring break, as a base where the teacher, Stacey Barth, will further extend into a complete curriculum to share with other future schools that installed a CAVERN system.
This week, while other teammates were away at GDC, Yingjie walked Stacey through the roadmap, as the students at South Fayette are also eager to build simple experiences on CAVERN that they can also showcase during Digital Promise. In the process, a package bug was caught and fixed.
Next Steps
While GDC slightly halted the development this week, we are still ever prepared for the next week, which will eventually be called the week of demoing and playtesting, as it contains not only Digital Promise, but also ETC’s official Playtesting Day that will happen at the end of the week.