Welcome to Project Workbench’s blog. In this blog, we will be posting weekly updates about what our team is currently working on in a bid to give you, the reader, a better understanding and deeper insight into how our team functions, how an ETC project functions, and how we collaborate and engage with our client, project advisers, and faculty members.

So what is Project Workbench? Project Workbench is a continuation of last year’s Project Sawmill. In Project Sawmill, the team worked with their client Amazon, to make a Twitch-integrated game built in Amazon Lumberyard, their in-house proprietary game engine.

But with a new year, comes a new team and new challenges. Our team of seven has a strong technical foundation, and we will be working across this semester to create an engaging game which will appeal to Streamers and Twitch Audiences alike. Our focus this semester will be on designing a game from scratch, developing an effective pipeline that allows the team to reach their goals, meeting client expectations, and technical documentation.

Technical documentation will be forming a large part of our efforts for this semester. Lumberyard is a game engine that is in a relatively nascent stage, when compared to established engines such as Unity and Unreal. As such, our team is in a unique position to create technical documentation from the perspective of students who have used these aforementioned engines before, in a way that can be contextually digested and understood by future teams, while Lumberyard limbers up towards eventual release (it is currently in Beta).

During our first week, we had the opportunity to meet with our project advisors, Chris Klug and Jess Hammer, to get a better sense of the expectations on us for this semester. They will also be providing the team with guidance and feedback. Our advisors come with a lot of design experience, and we hope to be able to successfully leverage their expertise into our project.

We also had the opportunity to meet and discuss ideas with our client liaison, Tom Corbett, in a bid to gain a deeper insight into the kind of expectations that he has for our team going forward. We were able to get a great sense of what he would like to see in a Twitch game, and challenged us to pitch him fresh ideas for a game.

Our first week week started off with us getting familiarized with the Lumberyard’s ecosystem following a tedious installation process. As the semester – and our ideas – develop, we will be updating our blog with our progress, lessons learned, and areas of technical relevance.