Dragon Question

Dragon Question is my current ETC project. We’re plotting out an adventure game and a rhythm game based off the original game’s principles of simple interface and cooperative play. I’m the lead designer on the project, and recently received the swanky new title of “director.” Ooh!

The original Dragon Question was a three-player cooperative game, set in a pop-up storybook and based around minigames and story sequences. I was a game designer and the scenario writer.

Dragon Question was built around a large (huge, actually) rotating, lazy-susan-style table, containing the players’ controllers on one side. The controllers consisted of one input each, all of them utilized in different ways for each minigame. The first player (as Vincent) used a single rotating knob, the second (as Alexander) used a sliding knob, and the third (as Elric) used a vibration sensor set to detect blowing. This necessitated frequent use of the word “blowing” when I explained the game to players, which was a great source of fun.

Another, more intentional, source of fun was the rewards we handed out to players after each minigame. The rotating table was originally designed to give people different inputs for each game, but in two weeks that proved impractical. We were left with a rotating table that wasn’t for anything. Good design principles dictate that you throw something out if it no longer does anything. Awesome design principles dictate that you figure out something cool for it to do. In our case, we curtained off the backside of the table and used the “backstage” to load up treats and treasures that we’d rotate out towards the players between minigames .

Giving people chocolate is arguably a cheap shortcut to winning hearts and minds, but we do what works. But we also had some very cool games and a fun platform to play them on, and we got people to have fun playing together.

More on the original Dragon Question:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

3-minute Trailer

Rabbit-Proof Fencing

Rabbit-Proof Fencing was a game I wrote and game-designed for, built for a sword-shaped controller that the player swings to fight rabbits and cane toads (both of which are pests in Australia, rabbits for their rapid population growth and cane toads for their poison). It’s a first-person game, in which rabbits and toads hop towards the screen and the player swings the sword to knock them away.
It is also, in almost every way imaginable, the simplest game we could make. We told people to “swing” the sword to attack, but the only moving part of the sword is a mercury switch, which is entirely binary: when the sword is pointing up, it’s not attacking, and when the sword is pointing down, it is. So: if the player lets the sword droop, he’ll hit the enemies every time. The smoke-and-mirrors part of the game was our insistence, as the game’s presenters, that the sword MUST be pointing up when the player isn’t attacking.
It worked. I never saw anybody figure out how the game really worked, though everybody seemed to have their own theory about the best way to swing the sword.
The game’s a semester project now, being developed as a tool for attracting foreign students to the city of Adelaide, for a client called Education Adelaide. I’m not officially part of the project, because I’m on the other side of the planet and I’ve got a project of my own, but I’ll be talking with the team. I don’t know much about the project yet, because the Australian semester hasn’t started yet, but I assume they’ll have to replace the smoke-and-mirrors with full functionality and replace the mercury switch with something safer.
I mean, the mercury was wrapped up, perfectly safe, but people get squeamish around a metal that causes brain damage. So, yeah.

Educate yourself further: Rabbit-Proof Fencing lives here

Parallel Worlds: Pittsburgh and Adelaide

My ETC education started in Australia, and in retrospect I should have expected a tough time. Oh sure, I dosed myself with increasing amounts of a venom cocktail so that I could shrug off the bites of the native fauna, but what I should have braced myself for was a campus that hasn’t proved itself in the way that the Pittsburgh ETC has. And yet now it’s the third semester and I’ve got projects going on two campuses. I’ve truly hit the big time, inasmuch as one can hit the big time while still working as a student, within a school.

Hi, by the way. I’m Trent Burg, and I’m a game designer at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center. I’m working in Pittsburgh on a project called “Dragon Question” and I’ve got ties to a project in Australia called “Rabbit-Proof Fencing,” which is being developed along with an outfit called Education Adelaide as a tool for attracting foreign students.

Both of them started as two-week projects in a class called Building Virtual Worlds, or BVW, a first-semester course in which five such projects are made by constantly-changing teams. So I’m part of the first and second ETC semester projects to come from BVW projects- although a much smaller part of the one that’s taking place on the other side of the world.

Here's the trailer for the original Dragon Question, on which my current project is based:

For the truly impatient, there's a shot of the real-world interfaces at about 20 seconds, and the action picks up big-time at 1:45. Full gameplay videos are here:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Rabbit-Proof Fencing can be learned-about here.