Blog

From last week, the Simtopia team pitched their nailed down prototype idea: 3D modular building simulation in VR that enables change of perspective to the faculty.

With different faculty visiting the project, a lot of feedback was given in terms of creative vision, scope, game mechanics, design implementation, and how to formulate a strategy for the rest of the semester.

As the team shared their milestones with not only the faculty but also their client, Simtopia was able to receive concrete feedback and direction for how they would like to proceed for the semester.

Faculty advisor, Carl Rosendahl visits the Simtopia team for quarters and tries out their current prototype!

For the following week, Simtopia plans on creating a production plan for the rest of semester and especially up to their halves midterm as that is when Simtopia plans on having their working demo prototype completed by. This will be useful information to have in addition to the current milestone trajectory that they hope to hit. By constructing an asset list that prioritizes what is important (things that the experience should have, could have, or would have), Simtopia aims to precisely move in a direction of their gaming experience.

Stay tuned next week to hear about our production plan and refined design for our experience!

For this week, the Simtopia team took their brainstorms and entered the prototyping phase. Two core experiences were created and playtested with not only fellow students at the ETC but also industry professionals that came to visit including Apple and Riot Games. In addition, the team geared up for quarter walkarounds and quarter sit-downs which is sort of like a quarter midway point in the semester prior to midterms at the ETC.

 

The Simtopia team playtested their prototype experiences with Apple during their company visit to the ETC to showcase to them interactions in virtual reality. Gaining feedback from industry professionals from those knowledgeable about scale and perspective was useful for Simtopia as we continue to iterate.

Additionally, the Simtopia team also playtested their prototypes with Riot Games. The feedback given from the team was quite useful and interesting to hear from a gaming perspective across their various disciplines. It was so much fun to see what they created!

Getting ready for quarter walkarounds and sitdowns was also quite important for Simtopia. From prototyping and playtesting these experiences to receive feedback, Simtopia wanted to have a rough idea nailed down for the experience that they would like to proceed towards to be in a direction to receive faculty feedback to help them with how to proceed for the rest of the semester. This was useful to present to their client, Maxis as well.

Simtopia needed to gather together their direction, design pillars, mood board and inspiration pieces, composition box, milestone list, and theming to present to the faculty.

Thought was put into theming the room to make the environment more immersive for guests especially when they visit the space during playtesting, company visits, or even the annual ETC festival at the end of the semester.

Simtopia team member, Sahar paints plumbobs to hang around the project room one evening in the paint room while team members Iris, Xuefan, and Sahar attend a laser cutting training session to create some designs for theming too.

As the team geared up for quarters next week – the members also aimed to nail their prototype down for faculty and client feedback at their quarter midway point. Guests responded favorably to the 3D modular building experience as shown in the video below (but also enjoyed the in-habitation and embodiment of creatures in the other prototype experience).

Link to Prototype Experience

Thus, the challenge consisting for Simtopia involves how to combine these favorable outcomes while designing a fun immersive VR world building experience in the Vive Pro for an experience that should last roughly 10-15 minutes!

See you next week for more developments and see how quarters went for Simtopia!

For this week, our team delved a bit deeper into our brainstorms for potential games for the virtual reality game from the previous week to come up with more concrete ideas and direction of where our project could go. After creating a high level schematic of our various ideas, we were able to pinpoint strong core features shared among our thoughts, to collectively form a unified agreement among our team of what is important for development as well as consulting our client.

Our team came to the realization that the core elements of simulation and strategy were the types of games we were interested in as well as incorporating elements of exploration and role play. Further discussion occurred involving thinking about potential game mechanics and interactions. This led us to start thinking of prototyping! With all hands on deck, the Simtopia team jumped right into prototyping two experiences to test various interactions for what would essentially be fun for our guest and also what would make sense technically.

Team members, Mengqi and Iris, are shown in the preliminary stages of prototyping the experience on the Vive Pro.

By trying out these interactions and builds in Unity, team member Tianyi works to see if the prototype will be feasible before spending extra time on the details. This helps Simtopia with rapid iteration for play testing next week.

While the team tests out interactions in virtual reality, we also aimed to create small quick environment assets to test out the scale of various features.

Design and interactions are critical at this time, so we are making sure to track our progression through diagrams, schematics, and technical documentation so that it is easy to refer to later.

Stay tuned next week as the Simtopia team learns which experience turns out to be the strongest through playtesting!

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!