Cracked

Cracked is a academic project that was created and developed for the Building Virtual Worlds class at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technologies Center. The game was built as the round 4, story/narrative, based round, and was built in 3 weeks.

The team behind the project consisted of Byunghwan "Phan" Lee (Artist), Jonathan Ahnert (Sound Designer), Navyata Bawa (Programmer), Richard Haiyue Yu (Programmer), and Dale Wones (Artist).

As for myself, I was a 3D modeler as well as a prop maker for the game. Phan and myself split the 3D modeling, which allowed me to build the sandbox controller using the makey makey platform.

The controller base was built in a day in my wood-shop at home. We wanted a compact controller that would also allow the player to have a sense of mystery and unknowingness of where the hidden items were in the sand. We also wanted to integrate the birds nest into the controller. To make the aesthetics of the nest, I cut the bottom out of a basket and cut the basket in half.

As for how the controller works, the items that are hidden in the sand have magnets attached to the bottom of them, with a patch of aluminum tape. The magnet on the item contacts another magnet on the bottom of the sandbox, which holds it in place when sand it place on top of the item. The aluminum tape allows the item to move while still making contact with the two wires from the Makey Makey. The item, while it it on the wires, is registered as a button press and hold. When picked up, it is registered as a button release.

Now for placing the items in the nest for the bird to react to. The system still is running the Makey Makey platform, but now instead of a single keystroke as registration you need 2. To handle this I used the same wire and magnet technique as for when the items are in the sand, along with introducing flapper switches. To confirm that the item was one of the 3 correct items, the switch had to be pressed as well as make the connection of the wires. The incorrect items   would only press the flapper switch and not connect the wires, only sending 1 of the 2 needed key strokes.