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.