Sawmill: The Amazon/Twitch Project

Introduction

Hi! We are team Sawmill, comprised of six Carnegie Mellon University graduate students at the Entertainment Technology Center. Our team is:
Antonin (Tony), Lead Producer/Designer
Maya, Lead Artist
Sarvesh, Lead Programmer
Cody, Producer/Lead Designer
Guangya, Artist
Le, Programmer

ETC projects get two faculty members who are working with us as advisers on our project. Their role is to help us stay on track, as well as support our team with clients, other faculty, and unforseen issues that might arise. They are:
Chris Klug
Jessica Hammer

The Project

Over a year ago, ETC began talks with Amazon to see how students might be able to start doing research into the area of audience participation in games through the online streaming service Twitch.tv which Amazon acquired in recent years. Amazon recently entered the realm of game development, and released a new game engine, Lumberyard. As talks progressed, some classes at the university were asked to start looking into Audience Participation Games (APGs). The next milestone was to get a project at ETC to develop a game in Lumberyard.

That’s us.

The Sawmill team has been assembled to be the first team at CMU to build on the Lumberyard engine. We’re also the first two-semester studio project at the ETC, with a pre-production (spring 2017) and production (fall 2017) component handled by two separate teams. The result will be a Twitch-integrated audience-participatory video game of quality and depth that single-semester projects simply can’t manage. Looking toward the semester ahead, we have a few major challenges ahead of us. We need to:
– learn a new game engine;
– develop the pipeline for work to flow across the project team boundary, from concept work to finished game;
– design a game that is interesting to both streamers and their viewers;
– build architecture and documentation for future teams beyond this two-semester project to use when working in Lumberyard.

This first week has been mostly administrative (counting wires, finding white boards, and fixing our schedule); next week the real fun begins.