Tag Archives: entertainment technology center

Personal Blog

Of illness, WoW, and weddings…

Project work at the ETC has been advancing at a steady yet exciting pace. I am finding myself facing a HUGE game design challenging: designing an interactive gameplay experience that can sustain an opt-in audience for 3 hours. Eek! Challenging, yes, but I can do it!

If you’re curious about my project this semester, you can read up about it here: http://etc.cmu.edu/projects/getinline

Progress has been impeded slightly by a few days of illness on my part. It’s been a strange sickness, with fever dreams and dizziness. It’s like having the feeling of having slept on a boat, and getting that leftover dizzy off-balance feeling even while awake. Bleh. I have been dutifully sent home and to bed day after day by my producer, advisors, and professors. I am TERRIBLE at being sick. I feel so guilty that I can’t be contributing! It’s a silly thing, I know, and logic brain knows…it’s emotional brain’s fault.

WoW has become much more exciting of a hobby since I nosed my Insomniacs into transferring their mains to my realm, and since some other ETC guildies were able to transfer their mains (the PvE -> PvP transfer enable was the best ever!). We are preparing for a guild Karazhan run, which will be the most fun ever! It’s almost like we’re a real guild, albeit a casual and super low-key one.

I am hoping my sickness subsides soon, for Kyle and Angel’s wedding is but a week away! How exciting!! It’ll be nice to spend time with the ballers on this happy occasion. I miss them terribly!

Games and Game Development, Personal Blog

LA Week 1 = success!

Well, my first week in Burbank has wound to a close, and I’d consider it a success so far.

Insomniac is great. It’s a very busy time there, so it’s going to be challenging but fun. My supervisor and mentor are very kind, and the whole team is very friendly. Due to the NDA, I can’t talk about what I’m doing. But since it’s been announced, I CAN say I’m working on Resistance 2, and I can say that this summer is going to be awesome fun and learning.

Meanwhile, I’ve been being social as well. My roommates, found randomly through craigslist, are very cool. One of them has a cat, which will make my summer all the better!

There are also lots of ETC alums and ETC first-years doing internships in town, so plenty of people to hang out with. On Friday, the alums took the first-years to Santa Monica for a welcoming of sorts. There was dinner and bowling. Photos follow…

http://picasaweb.google.com/wertle.dragon/SantaMonica

There’s also been Rock Band with Rob and Evan, and exploring adventures and bike rides. So far so good!

Personal Blog

Spring Semester Photo Journal – Abridged!

I posted about the fancy camera I got for Christmas, and I do enjoy using it! However, I’m really bad about sorting through and posting photos after I take them. So, every now and then, I dump all the photos off my camera to clean them up.

Here are a few shots from this semester’s photo dump. Take a look, you might be in there!

http://picasaweb.google.com/wertle.dragon/PhotoDumpSpring08

Personal Blog

Animation

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Hey Internet, I wanted to show off some of my classmates’ work, and get you guys to give them some feedback.

This student group worked this semester to create a 4 minute animation addressing issues that come up in working in cross-cultural environments. In particular, it talks about language barriers. It’s done in a “Creature Comforts” documentary/interview sort of style..

Please watch it and fill our their survey so they can polish it off…

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/cultural/finalCut.html

I’m very proud of them, I know they worked their asses off to put together this animation in such a short time, and I think they did a great job!

Games and Game Development, Personal Blog

Spring Break (woo)

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Back in the Bandology office after Spring Break. It wasn’t particularly much of a break, but that’s okay. Several things of note happened…

1) Will and I made amazing headway in the Bryan Scary project. I’m very happy with where we stand right now, and I know we can finish the video in time for their album release. I KNOW we can! It’s just going to take continued and consistent work.

2) I started playing Urban Dead again. I’d played often when Kevan first came up with this gem, and had great fun, and then just sort of fell out of the loop. It’s a good time to start playing again, for the zombies have more of an upper hand than they ever have! It makes playing a survivor rather exciting. I have a zombie character as well, in the temporary Monroeville map, but being a low-level zombie is not much fun. I only managed to find a horde once, and the rest of the time it’s been shambling around alone, getting knocked down by survivors left and right. I enjoy playing the survivor much more.

3) I picked up one of my WoW alts, a hunter, and decided that I want to learn how to kite. Kiting is tricky business, and difficult to do well, and I want to be able to do it! There was also more WoWing in general during spring break: an instance here, a battleground there, a round of WoW-and-go-Seek to top it off…Good fun times

Now, though, it’s back to work! We’re at the halfway point with Bandology this semester, and there’s still so much left to do!

Personal Blog

GDC Summary

So at the end of the day, I went to Ubisoft to meet up with my mentor for the last time. Joe came along too, such that I wouldn’t have to walk by myself.

The greatest thing about winning this scholarship was definitely the mentor program. Chris is such a nice guy, with lots of industry experience, and is completely devoted to helping young people coming into the industry from an education route. I’m certain he’s a person I will keep in touch with! Joe and I thought it would be awesome if IGDA had a mentoring program beyond the GDC scholarship, because it’s such an incredibly helpful opportunity to have a mentor; someone with much more experience than you that you don’t have to worry about impressing, but instead are able to ask questions and come to with stories and concerns.

The first thing I’m doing when I get home is writing my mentor a nice little thank-you card. I imagine that Chris would be the sort of person who would love to bring Ubisoft to the ETC in a similar way that many other game companies do, though his schedule as a producer is so busy that this might not be a possibility. Even still, I feel very grateful that I have this awesome person to go to for advice and help whenever I need it.

It seems Andy wasn’t the only one to catch a cold at the IGDA party. We’re sitting in the airport and the Schell Games crew showed up, towing a few sniffling, coughing, sore-throated members of their own. We’re all on the same red-eye flight back to Pittsburgh, so that’s pretty cool.

In closing, I’m really glad I had the opportunity to come to GDC. It was exhausting, yes, but a fantastic and worthwhile experience that I will not take for granted!

Personal Blog

GDC Thursday and Friday

So I fell behind on my daily updates, whoops! Thursday was largely uneventful. I worked the career floor and talked with a lot of different companies. I went to one panel about the Future of MMOs, but it grew so snippy and snarky that I decided to duck out early, especially after learning that Andy had met up with Bryan Cash on the expo floor. <3 Bryan Cash! We had a lovely lunch, but the rest of the afternoon was lost to me. I had forgotten to take my medicine the day before, and so was quite exhausted and in a lot of pain by the afternoon. Andy, growing more and more ill by the day, was also ready to turn in, so we went back to the hotel and had a very restful evening. Today was much better (and I kept my exhaustion in check with a Mt. Dew). I saw two very interesting talks: one about Entrepreneurship and Pandemic, and one which was an Expo of start-up companies (none of which were game companies, but which had some innovative tie to the game industry: patch clients that doubled as social networks, microtransaction management services for MMOs, and the like). After lunch, we hit up the career floor to watch Andy impress the crowd with his Guitar Hero skills, and then the expo floor again to play some of the Independent Game Festival games. For now I'm relaxing and considering attending the Portal post-mortem. At 5 I'll be visiting my mentor at Ubisoft, and then the lot of us ETCers will be flying back to Pittsburgh on a red-eye. All in all, I'm very glad I came to GDC. There was much to learn and many people to see, and I feel it was well worth it, and am thrilled to have won the scholarship. I am, however, exhausted to the core of my bones. So many people! I am drained and dry, but still excited to get back to the ETC and apply what I've learned to Bandology. I will, however, likely need a full day of sleep to catch my brain up, and another full day of emailing follow-ups to everyone I've met at the conference. Hooray for GDC! Hooray for Lisa Brown: Game Designer!

Personal Blog

GDC Wednesday Afternoon

So, we didn’t make it to Ubisoft this afternoon, but that’s okay. Instead, my mentor and I walked the Expo floor, and it was great fun times! There were some interesting setups, yes, but mostly we just had fantastic conversations about this and that and the other. My mentor is brilliantly easy to talk to.

We ran into Brenda, and I introduced the two, and we had an intriguing conversation about improv acting and its role in the industry (and in all industries! Everyone should take an improv class, in my opinion). We also had fun scoping out our favorites of the Independent Games Festival (go World of Goo and Polarity! Also? AudioSurf is FREAKIN AMAZING).

This evening I spent chillaxin with Andy (who is a bit sick, as are many people, I blame the IGDA party!). We watched Robot Chicken and MythBusters and a fantastic show about sea critters (if I see a cuttlefish on TV, I can’t resist) and have a lovely time. We finished off the evening with a great Bandology meeting, and I’m excited about my return to school and the work I’ll be doing.

Looking forward to another exciting day tomorrow!

Personal Blog

I am a Game Designer

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This morning at GDC, I made a career change.

Now, don’t misunderstand, this wasn’t an on-the-fly decision. It’s something that’s been bubbling and building for a couple of months now. Last night, Tracy and Andy tipped me over the edge by suggesting I would probably get the most out of a design internship this summer versus any other type.

This morning I went to talk about High Impact’s production process, given by one of their lead designers. I had a moment of recognition that truly, I was sitting on the wrong side of the court. After the session, I plopped down, pulled out my laptop, nudged Jesse online and said “I think that maybe I should be looking for a design internship and not a production internship.”

He responded, “I think you might be right.” I could almost hear him smirking through the internet, the knowing smirk of someone who’s known this about me for a good while, but was nudging and waiting for me to figure it out on my own.

Commitment! I spent the next couple of hours sitting on the floor of the convention center, frantically rewording my website and reworking my resume. Andy stopped by between sessions to sit with me and help revise my resume. Jesse stopped by to sit with me for support. A smattering of other ETCers stopped by to see what I was up to, and when I relayed my sudden career change, responded with, “Well, DUH!”

Why does everyone else figure these things out about me before I do?? Nevertheless, the changes were made, and I’m ready to hit the Career Expo tomorrow with my new goal. Huzzah!

Other highlights today included a big Bandology lunch (with past and present members alike), then a session given by Bungie on Matchmaking in Halo 3. It was extremely informative, though now I have Fiddler in the Roof stuck in my head.

Now I’m chillin and waiting for my my mentor, such that we can go adventure at Ubisoft. Huzzah!