As I graduate this May, I’m finishing my third year as a part of Aurum, our interdisciplinary project with the Robbins Library. Having worked on the project from both sides as an employee in both Robbins and Studio X as well managing the project for two years, I have plenty of material to look back on.
When I started working on this project in June 2022, I was a researcher in Robbins, reading up on all things alchemy in my carrel upstairs. I was loosely aware that we were building an alchemy lab in virtual reality, although at the time I had never put on a VR headset. I was interested in video games, though, and spent the summer finding alchemical recipes that could be easily translated into a game environment—essentially level design.
I saw the game for the first time soon after. The alchemy lab was high in a stone tower, almost entirely unfurnished, but with basic settings and some objects the player could be moved around. That year, the team in Studio X worked on modeling some new items, which I researched and mocked up in a series of concept sketches. After a year of research and character design, in the summer of 2023, I was promoted to project manager. I said a bittersweet farewell to Robbins and started work in Studio X.
In Studio X, I worked much more closely with the rest of the team. I quickly learned that when dealing with a team of student employees, a project team is constantly changing: students graduate, change teams, get assigned to any number of faculty projects, to name a few. Over my six semesters and two summers with the project, sixteen different team members built a new lab space, identified 11 alchemical recipes, 3D modeled every ingredient for said recipes, built an entire world, storyline, and cast of characters, and built and user-tested a diegetic user interface.
I’ve been consistently wowed by the quality of 3D models of period-accurate furniture and leather-bound manuscripts, game mechanics that allow us to grind mica and mix arsenic and venom of toads, and how the very manuscript that inspired the game was turned into our user interface. The team members I’ve had the pleasure to work with have suggested and implemented creative solutions to save computing power, make the game look and function better, and make our teams work together more smoothly.
But I’d be remiss to not acknowledge that I am proud of what I’ve contributed in my two years as project manager: creating and overseeing the UI/UX team, overhauling the game space to be a more period-accurate home lab, adding dedicated work hours to the project’s budget, and continuing to serve as a narrative consultant and fact-checker. As I hope to head into video game production in the future, being able to identify areas of improvement and see the changes brought to fruition has been incredibly rewarding, and I thank Studio X’s leadership for valuing my input so much.
Working on the project for over half of my undergraduate career, this project has become integral to my college experience. Since the length of my involvement was so much longer than prior managers, I’ve spent a lot of time this semester laying out transition plans and the next semester’s roadmap. I’ve centralized documentation on remaining recipes, reference images, and the (almost-complete!) storyline for the next team to work on. A highlight of the transition has been working in tandem with our incoming project manager Caleb Kohn-Blank on project decisions and team meetings.
As an English major, what I have always appreciated about this project is its interdisciplinary nature. It’s what introduced me to extended reality, which I’m not certain I would have tried otherwise (much less worked at Studio X for two years!). I hope this project continues to show others that the humanities and extended reality are not mutually exclusive disciplines—in fact, they play quite nicely with each other. It’s tough to know that I won’t be at Studio X long enough to see this project through to its completion. I’ll miss the Aurum team, but I’m confident in this next year’s cast of students that will work on it and endlessly proud of the mark I’ve left on it.
About this Author
Elizabeth Hogrefe, Karp Library Fellow, Narrative Designer
