A New Year

In this week’s post, I’m excited to share updates on a new direction for my grad school thesis, an overview of how the first week of classes went, and a brand-new segment about the development of Zakumba: Astraia, a game I’m working on with the indie studio Afro Duck. So, without further ado, let’s dive into the updates!

A New Direction

Over the break, I spent a lot of time reflecting on the direction I want to take with my grad school thesis. After some soul-searching, I’ve decided that dance isn’t the outlet I want to pursue. Instead, I’m exploring two exciting possibilities:

Investigating the components that make an NPC someone players empathize with and form an attachment to—and how that changes in VR.

Developing a VR gesture-based interaction system inspired by American Sign Language. The goal is to create a more intuitive way to interact with dialogue in VR while increasing accessibility for narrative-driven games.

Of course, these ideas are still evolving. As I dive deeper into these topics, I’m open to new insights and changes along the way. What I do know is that my thesis will center on story-driven games—because, ultimately, that’s why I’m here and not off at some cozy tech job.

A New Semester

The first week of the semester has gone pretty well! It’s been more focused on my GRA work than coursework, as most classes have just covered introductory material so far. Here are the highlights:

Unreal Class Assignment

Our first assignment is to create an animation using Unreal. This is uncharted territory for me—my experience lies in Unity, mostly on the programming and game design side, with only occasional forays into art. It’s a bit intimidating, but I’ve come up with a rough idea for the project:

The animation will feature four scenes:

1. A girl looking at a photo and a note from an old friend, inviting her to the park to rekindle their friendship.

2. The two meeting and chatting at the park.

3. A joyful moment as they play on the playground, reminiscing about their childhood.

4. The girl feeling overwhelmed by unresolved emotions and ultimately walking away, leaving the friend behind.

This concept lets me explore creating empathetic characters while leaning on my strength in motion capture to record the movements rather than hand-animating. Fingers crossed it turns out well!

GRA Updates

This week, I was tasked with recreating an old game for the project circle group (CIRCLE). The game involves controlling a frog with another player, catching flies, and avoiding wasps. Unfortunately, the original code was lost, but the art assets and a playable build were intact. I successfully recreated and improved it within the week! (I’ve included some images and videos below as references.)

I also began researching spatial interactions in VR, a new area for me. The goal is to use a room scan of the player’s environment to make the VR world reflect their physical play space. This week was all about exploring Meta’s MRKit documentation and samples. Next up is creating a virtual environment that replaces the user’s furniture and props with randomly selected virtual ones. By the end of the semester, we hope to use this setup for dancers. Let’s see how it goes!

Froggy Demo Video

A New Segment

I’m excited to introduce a recurring segment about Zakumba: Astraia, an upcoming Action-RPG by Afro Duck Studios. I joined the team about three years ago to help reboot the game’s codebase. Since then, I’ve worked on systems like combat, AI, inventory, and even a dialogue parser that speeds up the writers’ workflow by converting plain text files into usable formats for the game.

This week, my focus was creating a shop menu prototype for the game’s Vertical Slice, due at the end of the month. I built the core functionality for players to buy and sell items using in-game currency, drawing inspiration from my previous work. The art will come later, but for now, the system is fully functional. (Check out the references below to see its progress!)

Demo of Shop Menu

Conclusions

Overall, it’s been a productive start to the semester. After the winter break, I was worried I might feel rusty, but this week proved otherwise. That said, I won’t pretend I’m not nervous about juggling everything ahead. Here’s hoping blocking out time to write these posts helps me stay consistent—and maybe even makes the journey a little more fun.

Until next Sunday, logging off.