Week 15 – The ETC Festival

As mentioned from last week, for Week 15, the ETC Festival was hosted which is one of the biggest annual events for the department. Guests, industry professionals, alum, and more visit the ETC to try out various experiences. Simtopia was actually a big hit! We needed to give out tickets to guests so that they could reserve a time slot with us to make sure we were giving those interested in trying our experience enough time.

Guests visit the Simtopia team's project room and many people enjoy conversation on what the experience brings, other guests try out the interactions in the Vive Pro as others look on, and the team explains how the entire prototype comes together.

Simtopia's experience designer, Mengqi Wu, discusses how the design and interactions work for building a customizable space station in the God scale view and then how to embody one of the creatures to enter the first person view in the Simtopia experience to the festival guests.

Some guests just had way too much fun! Some people ended up enjoying the 3D building part more whereas other guests found the first person perspective to be more up their alley. The interactions in the both perspectives allowed Simtopia to see that the prototype was working well for users.

The prototype experience definitely came a long way since halves. To celebrate the victories accomplished this week, the team enjoyed their team Dinner at Monterey Bay Fish Grotto in Pittsburgh! It was surely a day to remember.

However, Simtopia could not rest yet. With their final presentations and playthroughs coming up, the team wanted to make sure to include their final polish to the experience and wrap up any documentation.

Here are the milestones achieved for week 15:

  • Design:
    • Simtopia’s Design Guide (Internal Polish)
    • Simtopia’s External Visual Design Guide (Polish)
  • Art:
    • Added effects for fixing modules
    • Fixed remaining animation fixes
  • Programming:
    • Festival build
    • Fixed AI bugs and improve AI
    • Improved building snap
    • Added fix VFX 
    • Added fixed animations
    • A lot of small bugs
    • Simimon Animation State implementation
    • Robomon Animation State implementation
  • Sound:
    • System sound:
      • TriggerUp
      • TriggerUpRight
      • TriggerUpWrong
      • Trigger Down
      • FadeIn
      • FadeOut
      • TouchPadClick
      • TouchPadSwap
    • Fixing Jetpad sfx

Thanks so much for reading and check out the team’s final post for the semester next week as we showcase our work for the final presentation and playthroughs!