Digital Animation and Interactive Media

Exhibition Artifact: 
State Builder for Unity

Artifact Description:
The State Builder (alternately known as the Step Manager) is an interactive tool that has been built over a series of projects, one of which is in this exhibition! It is a tool that is meant to be used within the Unity game engine to allow the creation of narrative sequences, with VR support. Many of my peers approached me with the same dilemna, needing to create stories within Unity but being stumped by technical barriers, and this tools attempts to address these obstacles. The Step Manager provides a useful UI for being able to see sets of actions--ways of changing the game environment--and allows for those actions to be quickly added and configured. These actions are combined into sequences, which can be connected to triggers--different kinds of player input. Importantly, the design of this tool was created with a participatory mindset and with co-design methods: the lived experiences of the designers I worked with were pivotal to what this tool is today. Through an iterative process, we have attempted to reimagine what this problem space and game tool could be.

Technical Description:
Format: Unity Editor with optional VR component
Software: Unity, Meta Quest Link App, Meta Quest Developer Hub, Visual Studio IDE
Programming Language: C#

Project Title: 
Designing for Technical Designers: Embracing Co-design Methods for Game Development Tooling 

Project Description:
As video game development becomes more popular, the need for better game development tools simultaneously continues to grow. This thesis explores two important roles which are fairly new and relatively unexplored as a subject of research (Hauteville, 2019) (“Avoid an Identity Crisis as a Technical Designer”, 2022): the technical designer (TD) and technical artist (TA). This paper seeks to understand TDs and TAs support and augment game development pipelines through the creation of new tools and workflows. Further, it demonstrates what this work can look like in practice through a series of auto-ethnographic case studies. These case studies showcase a variety of game editor tools, scripts, and game content, alongside the collaborative processes which led to them, which all contributed to the production of various game projects. The important question in analyzing these case studies is how such tools, content, and processes help or hinder the creativity of the projects’ lead designers and artists. Finally, this thesis explores the hidden connections between current tools design processes and co-design methods and attempts to envision how more formal co-design processes and a co-creative mentality can help make better technical designers and technical artists. 

Committee Members:
Scott Swearingen (Advisor), Shadrick Addy, Alex Oliszewski

Keywords:
Technical Design, Tools Design, Technical Art, Co-design, Game Design, Game Engines