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.