Hello world! We are WonderLab, a team of seven students at the Entertainment Technology Center. This semester, we are partnering with Give Kids The World, a nonprofit resort in central Florida that provides critically ill children and their families with week-long wish vacations at no cost. Our goal is to support GKTW by creating an interactive experience in which visiting children and their families can explore, learn, and play. We hope to use this development blog as a medium by which we can document our work and share it with others.
Understanding Our Team
The very first thing we did this week was to virtually meet and get to know each other. In addition to setting up standard communication methods and collaboration tools, we really worked to understand everyone’s individual skillsets and interests, as we want to play to our strengths when developing project ideas. Our team has great experience with game development and the 3D digital art pipeline, and some of us also have experience with hardware, designing and building physical props. Therefore we are leaning towards developing a virtual experience with the possibility of interfacing with physical interactables to enhance the experience.
Learning about Our Client
While we are waiting to hear from our client and set up our first external meeting, we met with our faculty instructors Chris Klug and Shirley Saldamarco. Our team also investigated as many past ETC projects for Give Kids The World as we could find, and with the help of ETC faculty Mike Christel and Bryan Maher, we found this article about the long history between the ETC and GKTW. We then navigated the ETC archive to collect text and video documentation of all the previous Give Kids The World projects. These resources have helped us to gain a deeper understanding of our client and have also been incredibly inspirational for our team.
With this preliminary research under our belt, we are eager to connect with our clients at GKTW and talk about the project in detail.