Hi everyone!

I’m a junior in the BCSA (Computer Science and Art) program at Carnegie Mellon. The areas of study I’m interested in include video games, computer graphics, animation, illustration, graphic novels, and storytelling. This semester in IACD, I hope to learn a lot about the many different tools available for programmer-artists and build the interactive side of my portfolio. I’m particularly interested in exploring interactive narratives in my future work.

Twitter account: https://twitter.com/sylviakosowski (Warning, I haven’t been using Twitter a lot recently (I’m more of a Tumblr person), so on my Twitter there are mostly just a ton of tweets that look kind of nonsensical. They were for a project I did while I interned at Autodesk last summer, pay them no mind.)

Github account: https://github.com/sylviakosowski

Website: http://www.sylviakosowski.com/ (Warning, currently under construction!)

Lost (Fall 2014)

Lost is a procedurally generated endless 2D platformer programmed in Unity/C#, and animated with Photoshop. It is a solo project created for Experimental Game Design. The player can explore a randomly generated world in all four directions, occasionally encountering non-player characters (NPCs) who will provide quests which the player can attempt to complete. However, there is a catch: platforms, NPCs, and items are deleted once they leave the main camera view. The game is meant to challenge the “quest” system common in many games by providing the player with quests that cannot be completed. It is very hard to give an NPC the particular item they are asking for. Whether they are given the item they want or an item they don’t want, the NPCs will act rude and discouraging in their conversations to the player. Yet if the player stops moving and refuses to complete any quests, a scribbly cloud of depression will form above the player’s head and cover the screen until the player moves again. These game mechanics are all meant to convey a sense of depression and a feeling of being trapped in an unsolvable situation.

The player (right) interacting with a non-player character (left).

Carrying an item.

I think the most successful part of the project was the art and atmosphere. I felt I did a good job designing disturbing yet somehow still cute-looking NPCs. The scribbly style of the animation and the largely empty nature of the world visually captured the sense of being emotionally lost that I was going for.

However, as far as the gameplay went, I didn’t accomplish all that I wanted to. Given more time, I wanted to make it so that the items you give the NPCs would influence how they acted toward you in nuanced ways. I didn’t have time to create such a sophisticated story generation mechanism, so right now the characters react in very straightforward cookie-cutter ways (i.e., there is a set response for a character who wants a cat but receives a windmill, etc.) Therefore, with such generic, non-evolving responses the game can get old pretty fast. If I had been able to create a more interesting and nuanced dialogue system in which all the items that the player gives or does not give to a particular NPC continued to influence that NPC’s dialogue to the player throughout the entire run of the game, I think the gameplay experience would be a lot more compelling.

A cloud of depression forming above the player’s head.

An ungrateful NPC receives an item from the player.

Builds for the game can be found on my website: http://www.sylviakosowski.com/lost/

Hi all,

I’m Zack Aman, and I’m in the Master’s of Human-Computer Interaction program here at Carnegie Mellon. I did my undergrad at the University of Virginia where I double-majored in Computer Science and Religious Studies and minored in Studio Art. I’m interested in the tooling behind creativity, both trying to find new creative uses for existing tools and the development of new tools to aid creation. From a programming standpoint, I’m most interested in input and the avenues humans have to take their vision and make it so.

You can follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@zackaman, and view my GitHub at https://github.com/zya6yu.

I’ve done art and I’ve done programming but I actually haven’t done too much in the way of art programming. You can view my artwork from undergrad at http://www.zacharyaman.com/, though I’m working on rebuilding that site to be a more UX-centric portfolio.

The most recent programming project I worked on was for an independent study with Professor Vincent Aleven and Yanjin Long (HCI PhD Candidate) working on teaching a growth mindset / mastery orientation to kids, which you can view here: https://medium.com/@zackaman/mastery-orientation-motivational-design-in-lynnette-9deaff48bfc6 and here on GitHub. I was responsible for designing, testing, and prototyping the project.

This project was built using the MEAN.js stack, which consists of MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.js, and Node.js, though mostly I was just working on the front-end with Angular and doing a little bit on the back-end with Express.

From my post on Medium:

In the words of O’Keefe et al., “A mastery goal orientation refers to a focus on developing competence. With a performance goal orientation, the focus is ondemonstrating competence” (51). That is to say: challenge is healthy and effective learning comes from growth, not from what you already know.

What we want to design are structures that get students out of the continuous rhythm of doing math problems over and over again and instead get students to question, “Which problems should I be doing?” However, we don’t just want to heavily support students in making decisions; we want to affirmatively teach students how to make their own decisions and create transferable selection strategies that are applicable in different domains.