As the semester draws to a close and we finish up the last few tasks before our final release, it’s important to keep in mind those who made this entire project possible!

In this post, I’d like to thank each of the people who contributed to Buggy AllStars. This project was a massive undertaking, and keeping it all going was no easy task!

Even with 25 students working together, it wouldn’t have worked if we didn’t have all the support we did. So, thank you!

The Client, who brought their project and passion to us

Thank you to our client — the Buggy Alumni Association and everyone within it that we worked with — both for their years of dedication to everything Buggy and for bringing the project to us in the first place! The project has been an incredible experience for all of us involved, and a rare opportunity to really push ourselves to the limit and see what can be done.

We especially have to thank the following people for taking the time out of their busy lives to work with us, check in with us, and see the project through to the finish:

Anne Witchner, Kaycee Palko, Ben Matzke, Laurel Bosshart, and Will Weiner

Their passion for Sweepstakes was infectious and drove us to keep the project going through thick and thin, and their confidence in us was a strong motivating force! So, thank you all!

The Faculty, who built and sustain the program we’re a part of

Keith Webster, Drew Davidson, Steve Audia, and Mary-Catherine Dieterle.

The IDeATe Staff who supported us

Thank you to Kelly Delaney, Gretchen Graff, George Minick, Tim Parenti, and Cody Szoska, the people who make IDeATe work!

The Interviewees and Consultants, who took the time to educate us

Thanks to Jesse Schell and Patrick Jalbert of Schell Games for their expertise in the early phases of the project as we ventured into the realm of designing a VR ride.

Additional thanks go to Michael Christel, who provided us with the video waiver we used before recording playtest sessions; Brad King, who provided us with the decades’ worth of footage and Buggy documentation; and thank you to Kristen Kurland and Emma Slayton for the GIS data we used in generating the terrain around the track.

Thank you to Paul Gerlach and Zachary Kowalewski from the Kiltie Band, who were so kind as to provide us with the score to the CMU Fight Song! Even though we were not able to use it for this iteration of the project, we look forward to integrating it into a future release!

And a big thanks to the buggy drivers and pushers we interviewed (Mary Garrett, Boyao Yu, Tishya Girdhar, and Annie Black) whose input and feedback were crucial in designing the experience from start to finish.!

Additional Assets Created and Contributed by…

The voice you heard in the game was none other than the “Voice of Buggy” himself, Will Weiner! He so generously contributed his time, sending us voiceline after voiceline whenever we needed something new.

The Main Menu music was entitled “Story has Begun (Kielokaz 156)”, by KieLoKaz. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. For more information on the license and its use you can follow this link.

An early rendition of the Cathedral of Learning was provided to us by James T. George, which we used to populate our skyline until we had the time to create our own asset.

Many of the campus models were built from existing assets made in a previous semester of Reality Computing (a CMU course also led by Tom Corbett). These models formed the foundation of our 3D modeling work, saving us a substantial amount of time and ensured that the art timeline was realistically achievable. The students in that course were as follows:

Mert Bozfakioglu, Lauren Zhang, Emily Zhou, Matthew Henderson, Skylar McAuliffe, Byungju Lee, and Woody McCoy.

And thank you to Justin C. Macey for letting us use the CMU Mocap Lab, which went a long way towards making the animations in the game look as fluid as they do!

And last, but certainly not least…

Thank you to the entire team, whose dedication even in this time of crisis kept the project moving. In a time when it would have been so easy to just disconnect, their perseverance was something to admire!

And finally, thank you for following along with us in this immense, crazy, risky journey. We hope that you enjoyed this peek into the development of this project, not to mention the game itself!

Stay safe out there, keep in touch, and we hope to see you all again one day!