Aidan Grant - Technical Art & Design Collection

Game - There's a Goblin in the Attic

There's a Goblin in the Attic is a first-person singleplayer anxiety-provoking resource management game. You have to balance the anger level of your boss and the annoyance level of the goblin in your attic to avoid being fired or having your house blown up. Made in Unreal, this game has been a fun and challenging journey for me. I've had to work from scratch on my own to create something I feel proud of & passionate about. I'm an anxious person by nature and I always feel like I have to be on top of everything, so I decided to explore a bit deeper into that part of myself by making this game designed to provide the player with an anxiety-provoking experience. I created this game for my senior capstone at RIT.

The game spans from Monday to Friday, progressively increasing in difficulty each day. You can play on Easy, Medium, and Hard - harder difficulties award more points, but alter the behavior of your boss and your attic goblin. Balance your life by running around your house trying to fix what your "friendly" attic goblin breaks while your boss yells at you to get your work done - but be careful not to let either get too angry, or you'll be in big trouble!

There's a Goblin in the Attic is available for free download here (along with a list of attributions for the game).

Project - VR Historical Printing

Experience historical printing in virtual reality! Built for OpenXR headsets and controllers, this experience is designed to guide users through how to operate a printing press (specifically the Kelmscott/Goudy Albion press c. 1830). This project explores the possibilities Virtual Reality provides libraries and museums in expanding teaching and research opportunities. This technology is transforming the way cultural heritage institutions provide hands-on access to artifacts that would otherwise be locked away behind glass.

I worked as the VR Developer on this project for the Cary Graphic Arts Collection. I was responsible for integrating the press model (made a few years prior to my involvement in the project by RIT student Boyu Xu) into Unreal, making it interactable, and designing systems to engage the user and teach them how to operate the press.

The project was debuted at Imagine RIT, a festival that shows off the creativity and innovation of RIT students, faculty, and staff. My supervisors on this project were Shaun Foster and Steven Galbraith, who provided invaluable feedback and support!

Game - Flash From the Past

"Flash From the Past" is a game I created in Unreal Engine 5 with props kitbashed from multiple marketplace kits (for a full list of external assets, see here). I worked solo on all aspects of this project.

Story: The grandfather of Jamie, a 22-year old in her summer just out of college and on the lookout for a job, recently passed away. In his will, he left Jamie his old camera and the keys to his estate in rural Pennsylvania. Upon trying to use the camera, Jamie finds that it can take pictures of the past. Working through her Grandfather’s estate and looking into the past, she discovers a well-kept secret about her family, passed down through generations.

Project - VR Eye Tracking Ethical Displays

I had the opportunity to work with RIT professors Shaun Foster & Evan Selinger on a Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab Grant to research and display certain ethical implications of tracking a user's eyes in virtual reality.

Created with Unreal Engine using the HTC Vive Pro Eye, these scenarios all aim to outline certain possible uses for eye tracking. The first scene shows a Terms of Service agreement that a user agrees to by looking at numbered elements in order.

The second scenario shows a gallery with different displays: a room of black and white abstract cubes, a room of realistic and abstract paintings, and a room full of mannequin heads with common skin tone colors. As the user looks around, their preference data is gathered based on what types of media they looked at, and when the room contents are regenerated, the contents update based on the user's prior preferences.

The third scenario shows a virtual concert with band members. While harmless at first glance, the user's eyes are being tracked actively to determine what types of media they gravitate to the most - the band members are all wearing product examples for different companies, and now that the user's eyes are being tracked, those companies can have a quantitative number for how well their ads engage with users.

I created the environments and Unreal code for this project, as well as implementing video and sequence direction for the finished product. 3D assets from Epic Marketplace kits "Art, Fashion, Automotive Galleries and Showcases" by Dekogon Studios and "Modular Concert Stage" by Modulus Studio - Props were utilized for this project.

Tool - Batch Rename

Batch Rename is an editor utility tool for Unreal 5 with multiple features!

Features:
• Find and Replace
• Outliner and Content Browser Support
• Incrementing Support
• Prefixes and Suffixes
• Undo Function