Welcome to the Simtopia’s website!
Simtopia is a technical five-person student-led team with each person having a unique skillset ranging from technical art and design to programming and sound – but all with a knack for cooking up crazy ideas.
Working with a development team at Electronic Arts – Maxis Studios, Simtopia (located at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center) is developing a new gaming experience based in virtual reality utilizing the Vive Pro and HTC Vive. By empowering player creativity and emergent storytelling, Simtopia aims to pitch their unique ideas to the team and build a rich worldly interactive experience in this game discovery project.
Come visit this website periodically to check out our progress as we post our development weekly.
For this week, our team brainstormed a variety of ideas, attended a play-test workshop at the ETC, and explored new areas of development for what this rich interactive experience could be.
Busy at work, our team member Mengqi has spent time after the ETC playtesting workshop to brainstorm her ideas through a series of design thinking techniques.
Another one of our team members, Tianyi, provides his input and bounces ideas off Mengqi. Tianyi also spends time testing out various gestures and interactions in the Vive Pro.
With ideas already churning, scrum and agile implemented, production starting to kick-off, and of course – a giant llama ordered for the team’s room, the Simtopia team is excited for next steps in the game design process.
See you next week for further developments!