Building Virtual Worlds
Building Virtual Worlds (BVW) is the core class for the first semeseter of Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center (ETC). It is taught by Jesse Schell and Mk Haley, and focuses on working in groups of 4-5 in two week cycles on rapidly generating virtual worlds and games. The projects in this section were completed over the course of the Fall 2010 Semester.
For BVW, each person is given a role, and mine was Modeler/Animator. For all projects, with a few exceptions, the bulk of the work that I did was in modeling and animating the characters. On several projects I also handled or helped with texturing.
Round 0: Dragon Warm-Up:
The first assignment for BVW was unique to each role. Modelers had to invent, model, rig, and animate a dragon. Dragons are actually one of the first things I wanted to learn how to draw when I was young, so I was excited to see how far I could take this assignment.
I felt the time I spent rigging for Lockheed really helped me here, and I was able to complete the assignment in about 18 hours of work total. After completion, the dragon was eventually used by my Round 5 team, and textured by Pei Hong Tan.
Brief Animation Reel of the Dragon
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Round 1: Blocked In:
Blocked In is designed as a game for the 'HMD' (Head Mounted Display) device, as a puzzler. The player, wearing VR goggles with three trackers, (one on the head, two on the hands) builds a safe path for the protagonist (Ruzz) through a series of floating ruins. The player's right hand controls the Drone (for lifting blocks), while the player's left hand holds a board that is displayed in-game as the ground plane.
For this project, I made several pitches for a main character (Ruzz being the one we all agreed on), modeled, rigged, and animated him. I also handled modeling and texturing the environment.
Blocked In, FRAPsed through the HMD Device
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Round 2: Castle Stackers:
Castle Stackers was a "naive guest" BVW round. The objective was to create a simple, fun experience that could be picked up and played without having it explained in person.
Castle Stackers is played on the Playmotion system (similar to kinect), using two IR wands. The goal of the game is to stack your own castle as high as possible using the pieces provided, while trying to topple y our opponent's castle by throwing cows.
This project is actually all 2D, and for it I worked alongside our team's texture artist, Pei Hong Tan, to match drawing styles and make a coherent look and feel. During the project, I learned a great deal about illustration from Pei, and I taught Pei, in turn, techniques about making assets look vivid and distinct in-game. I also did the voices for the project, with Adam Lederer's direction and composition.
Castle Stackers on Vimeo at the ETC Alumni Convention
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Round 3: Dictala:
Round 3 was the "Lightning" round of BVW. We worked in a team of 4, and had one week to come up with a fun and repeditive mini-game.
What we came up with was a simple 2v2 reflex based strategy game played on an interface called the Jam-o-Drum. (Picture a circular table with four I-pod wheel/button combos). Each player would try to match four of the same kind of rune to build gems, and then slot those gems into their team's bank. The first team to fill a bank, won.
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Round 4: A Pawn's Tale:
A Pawn's Tale was our submission for the Story round, and was actually a joint project between two teams (making this an 8 man project).
The story itself is played out both on-screen and on-stage, and was admitted into the 2010 BVW Show. On-stage, two players move chess pieces in a fragment of a game of chess, while the pieces take on a life of their own on screen above them.
Below is the FRAPs for the digital parts of the story. (A later upload of the BVW Show will be added here.)
A Pawn's Tale, FRAPs for the BVW Show
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Round 5: Extremely Ominous Title:
The final BVW Round was a 5 person team directed to make a theatrical world. The world is about a haughty narrator who approaches the audience under the presumption that he's been invited to tell them an excellent story. He creates the characters, a setting, and then proceeds to try and kill off the characters as quickly as possible, and it's up to the audience to keep that from happening.
After finishing the project, all of us agreed that this was our favorite.
Extremely Ominous Title, FRAPs
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