Beyond the Stage, in retrospect

Beyond the Stage was my project at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University for the Spring 2012 semester.

Beyond the Stage was one marathon of a project. Most team members remember that it didn’t go ideally, but I still remember it very fondly. I loved what our goal was supposed to be. Entertainment technology and the stage working together. In the end, it turned out that even without the problems that were out of our control, the project was completely overscoped from the start. Still, many great lessons were learned on the way.

From Powerbomb the game based on the Pulizer-nominated play by one of our clients, Kris Diaz, we had a crash experience-based course on tough game design and design documents. We learned a lot about how to make an interface clear and how to manage player expectations and allow them to master the gameplay.

At my suggestion, we got to use the Impact game engine, which was for all of us our first time working with HTML5 and the Canvas element. Most of the programmers on this project really did love Impact and are still using it for some of their personal projects.

For the Vera Stark part of the project, for our client Pulitzer prize winner Lynn Nottage, I got to dive deep in Scala and the Lift Web Framework. It was hard, but I now understand and love them.

I also wrote and edited (but did not film) our team promo video:

Special thanks to Evan Brown, Rayya Brown-Wright, Brad Buchanan, Josephine Tsay and the oh-so-unique-and-irreplaceable Dana Shaw for being the best team members I could ever have wished for.

Heidegger, in retrospect

My last project at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon was Heidegger, at our Silicon Valley campus. The client was Electronic Arts and we were very lucky to be able to work with several people from the Dead Space team at Visceral. Our project was about finding a way to deduce player types though gameplay analytics and from there predict how likely people will be to like another game.

I worked on the interface with the very talented Anabelle Lee. She took care of aesthetics and I was in charge of functionality. I took that opportunity to improve my skills with the HTML 5 Canvas and jQuery. But, most of all, I got to experiment with Websockets and the fascinating Tornado web server, written in Python.

I also wrote and edited our promo video. I did not film it, though. That part went to other members of our team.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank Ben Medler, our fantastic client contact for just being so awesome.