Breaking Curses and Waving Flags
Highlights from my time at the CMU Entertainment Technology Center's Fall Festival.
Hey everyone! I’m back from my holiday hiatus, refreshed, and ready to get back to writing about all the wild stuff happening in the local tech scene. I’m sure your inboxes are chock-full of “Year in Review” and “Looking Back at 2025” posts, so I figured I’d skip that and hit you with something completely different. The Monthly Beat will be coming your way Monday, along with the return of the podcast version if you prefer listening rather than reading. For now, enjoy these highlights from earlier this month!
—Austin
It was a crisp December Friday night—only about 7pm, but already dark enough to feel like midnight—when I had the privilege of attending Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center (CMU ETC)’s Fall Festival. The ETC building is just off 2nd Ave across the river from South Side. With its modern, corporate exterior, I didn’t recognize it as my destination at first, but through the glass panes on the side, I could see a flurry of activity on its many floors.
Inside, I was welcomed and given a packet of things to start the night. I won’t lie, I got hype pretty quickly, seeing my class and list of objectives.
I’ll be honest, before this exact moment, I had no idea what this event was going to involve. I hadn’t really even heard of CMU ETC until a friendly DM (thanks Hannah!) with an invitation came my way. As an avid gamer and attendee of many a PAX East, I now knew it was about to be lit.
To start the night, I joined a line for something called “The Curse” designed by the Fall 2025 Experience Design class at CMU. A staff member greeted me and explained that it was an escape room-type experience, so I’d be working with whoever else was in line to solve it.
Only one other person was in line with me, so I struck up a conversation to see if they were mentally prepared to deal with my complete incompetence at escape rooms. Luckily, that person ended up being a super chill local game developer named Izzy who teaches at Highline Coding Academy.
After chatting about all the crazy things going on in the tech world for a bit, we were led inside and given a short tutorial on the mechanics of The Curse. The goal? Break the aforementioned Curse. How does one break such a curse? Well, first you have to solve THIS!
Once we had solved the puzzle on the panel (I won’t spoil), we used a digital book on the panel’s screen to guide us through the rest of the puzzle, which was styled after an Egyptian tomb.
After several minutes of tracing symbols, tapping scarabs, asking for hints from the staff, and poking the pharaohs in the eyes to increase the time limit, we finally broke the titular Curse! Despite my poor performance and need for multiple hints, Izzy and I still had a fantastic time. It blew my mind that this was made by a team of students here in Pittsburgh. The high production quality and attention to detail gave it a great feel, and I could see it starring in any number of escape room businesses.
Short on time, I quickly made my way to the top floor to try more demos. After jealously watching a kid walk a nature trail in a meditative VR hiking experience called Ascent, I sat down with a tablet and played a few rounds of Kicks Lab, an educational game for young sneaker heads.
Kicks Lab was a lot of fun and sported a really cool art style! I designed 5 different shoes for in-game customers according to their needs on a touchscreen tablet. The game simulates the real world physical behavior of various shoe making materials to help players learn how their design choices impact things like comfort and durability in shoes.
Next, I made my way down the hall to a darkened room filled with a massive set of curved projector screens where the 270°Fun team were demoing their interactive F1 racing game. I volunteered to play the “Cheerleader” role and was handed something I didn’t expect: a motion sensor taped to a stick with a flag! Then, as I waved the motion sensor in front of the screen, the in-game crowd started to cheer.
For the next 5 minutes, I was frantically running back and forth to make the crowd cheer so that my teammates could mash a button on their phone screens to juice up the F1 cars as they flew by. Here’s a clip of the victory lap.
With my last few minutes, I chatted with the folks from Team TACIT about their haptic glove VR project, watching as someone virtually ripped a heart out from someone with the glove! This experience is the result of the team experimenting with ways to elicit an emotional response from players with the haptic glove. The concept sounds like it would be super gory and dark, but instead it was surprisingly solemn and emotional—focusing more on the spiritual aspect of letting someone pass away to “the other side.” The cartoon-like graphics help it feel a little less dark as well, with the player physically feeling people’s heartbeats through the haptic glove, then deciding whether to grab the heart and end the person’s life.
I really wish I had budgeted enough time to check out all the other cool stuff on display that night. For next year’s event, I’m blocking off the whole night to try absolutely everything.
—Austin
P.S. If you’re interested in making a game yourself, the first session of Izzy’s upcoming game development class is this Sunday in Regent Square. Sign up here!