February’s ETC Community Achievements

A still from “I Expect You To Die 3”
A still from “I Expect You To Die 3”

Alumni Achievements

Schell Games’ “I Expect You To Die 3: Cog in the Machine” won the 2024 Best Independent Game Award as part of NYX’s annual Game of the Year awards. In their announcement, they describe how the game’s “charmingly retro-futuristic style and brilliant gameplay … proves that indie games can rival even the biggest blockbusters in creativity and depth.”

Pittsburgh-based Schell Games is led by ETC Distinguished Professor of the Practice Jesse Schell (INI ‘94), and many ETC alums worked on I Expect You To Die 3. This includes Game Design Lead Chance Lytle (ETC ‘20), Vice President of Art Reagan Heller (ETC ‘04), Engineering Director John Kolencheryl (ETC ‘10), Game Design Director Francisco Souki (ETC ‘10), Art Director Gabe Sabourin (ETC ‘04), Engineering Team members Weizhang Lee (ETC ‘19) and Wizard Hsu (ETC ‘22), Production Team member Kirsten Rispin-Moonan (ETC ‘16), and Art Rigging Team member Sophia Videva (ETC ‘22).  

Project Successes

The Spring 2024 project Flow has been named a finalist for Student Innovation in this year’s SXSW Innovation Awards. Led by second-year student Nina Wang, the team included second-year Ashling Tu, Christine Jung (‘24), Laura Yang (‘24), second-year Shih-Hung Liu, and Jiajian Zhang (‘24). This March, members of the team will attend SXSW where the winners in each category will be announced.

In Spring 2024, a team of ETC students Daaa Zhao, Hazel Yu, Iris Zhang, Messi Tu, Ivy Li, and Jerry Xie — started work on Beyond Touch: a project with the goal of leveraging the Apple Watch’s unique features in a game. With the support of Apple Senior Engineering Manager Gierad Laput, they developed the initial prototype of “Otter Agents: Truth or Lie.” Last semester, the Beyond Touch team extended their project another semester to continue working on the prototype and turn it into a finished product. It’s now available to download in the App Store and is the first social game made for the Apple Watch. 

In Fall 2023, a team of May 2024 ETC graduates — Varun Girdhar, James Tseng, Zibo Ye, Ash Wang, and Laura Yang — came together to work on INTENT. INTENT, short for “Interactive Tool for Empathy in Neurotypicals,” was created the goal of fostering an inclusive environment for autistic people in the workplace through a browser-based game that teaches their neurotypical colleagues about the condition and how to be better allies to their neurodiverse coworkers. The INTENT team collaborated with faculty advisors Scott Stevens and Mike Christel, CMU Software Engineering PhD candidate Morgan Evans, and CMU Associate Professor of Computer Science Andrew Begel to turn their project into a paper that Evans presented at the Joint Conference on Serious Games (JCSG). The project then went on to win a silver medal in the International Serious Play Awards.

Faculty Achievements

Derek Ham posing with Indian ETC alumni
Derek Ham posing with Indian ETC alumni
Derek speaking on a panel at IGDA
Derek speaking on a panel at IGDA

ETC Director Derek Ham travelled to India in November to attend 2024’s India Game Developers Conference (IDGC), where he gave a talk titled “A Collaborative and Computational Approach to Aesthetics in Game Design” and sat on a panel where he discussed the ETC’s unique educational approach. In December he traveled to Tokyo for SIGGRAPH Asia. At each location, Ham and Director of Marketing and Admission Rebecca Lombardi met with ETC alums living in both India and Japan. 

ETC Distinguished Professor of the Practice Jesse Schell was interviewed by Meta on their Meta Quest blog about his career path and the future of extended and virtual reality technologies — including the role the ETC has played in his thinking about it over time. “I started teaching virtual reality classes at Carnegie Mellon in the early 2000s,” Schell said. “I worked on literally over a thousand student projects that were creating virtual reality worlds. When it finally showed up in the market, I thought, “Oh, OK. I think I know what to do. I think I know how this works.”

ETC Associate Teaching Professor Jonathan Walton and Dietrich Teaching Professor of Chinese Studies Gang Liu have been awarded $25,000 dollars in Dietrich Seed Grant funding for their research work on the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s rare collection of ancient Chinese oracle bones — the earliest known form of writing in East Asia. Their project will include an undergraduate course this semester where undergraduates will work on 3D scanning some or all of the bone fragments. In the short term, these scans will be used for 3D-printing and interactive media projects; in the long term, Walton hopes they’ll be used to help digitally reassemble bone fragments currently spread across collections all over the world — a result of colonial archaeological processes. 

ETC Assistant Teaching Professor Moshe Mahler — whose short film, “The Art of Weightlessness,” was longlisted for this year’s Academy Awards — was interviewed about the film by The Hollywood Reporter. “Initially, I was interested in doing this abstract homage to arcs, which is a principle of animation, because Bill [Shannon, a performance artist and the film’s subject] moves in these sweeping arcs, so that would have been interesting enough for me, but we went out for a coffee and kind of had a creative meeting,” Mahler said. “How did someone end up so good at using crutches to breakdance or skateboard? It was kind of a question in my mind, and he talked about his evolution from childhood to adult and the evolution of his crutches and from there, it became clear that that was the direction: the storytelling aspect of his backstory.”

ETC Teaching Professor Ralph Vituccio’s film “Sisyphus Beach” has been selected as part of Ethnografilm Paris, a non-fiction film festival. In “Sisyphus Beach,” Vituccio reworks his earlier film about migrant workers salvaging materials from discarded ships into a poetic meditation on the nature of work. The film will play in Paris this April.

Student Achievements

This semester, seven of our second-year students are doing co-ops. While on co-op students work full-time in real jobs at companies for academic credit — while also in many cases being paid!

Daaa Zhao and Tony Tao are working as Unity Game Developers at AlterStaff, a new game development studio focusing on creating AI-powered entertainment experiences. Dazhou Hou is interning as a technical artist at EA Shanghai, while Kira Chen is working as an UX design intern at Ansys, an engineering software company with close ties to CMU. 

Bella Liu is working as a tools programming intern on Epic Games’s Niagara, a next-gen VFX system in Unreal Engine, while. Shih-Hung Liu is interning for ETC faculty member Mo Mahler’s interactive experience design + animation company BIG eMotion, working specifically on graphics engineering. Yue Lyu is working as a content creative intern at AltaTV, a mobile app featuring short form dramas. 

Sojitra and team accepting the award for his poster at UIST
Sojitra and team accepting the award for his poster at UIST

Second-year student Rushil Sojitra was part of a team that presented an award-winning poster in ACM UIST Conference‘s Student Innovation Content. UIST is the leading global conference for innovations in human-computer interface, with this year’s Student Innovation Contest focusing in particular on the next generation of interactive devices.

Rushil’s team — which included Carnegie Mellon University students in both the HCII and the School of Architecture — worked on MetaControllers, reconfigurable game controlling devices made of wood sheets that allows developers and players to customize how they control and interact with games. 


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