Zachary Thompson ’26— Turning Mrs. Riddle’s Oasis into a Video Game Map

It’s well known in our community that school founder Theodate Pope Riddle was a visionary. She imagined an indestructible school for boys among the forest and farmland of central Connecticut and made that vision a reality. However, it’s highly unlikely she could’ve ever envisioned her campus would one day be the setting of a video game—but one current Avonian is working to make that happen through the Advanced Independent Project (AIP) program.

Zachary Thompson ’26, a junior from Houston, Texas, is like many of his peers in that he enjoys playing video games. Zach's interest in video games, however, goes much deeper than that of most of his classmates. While he certainly enjoys playing them, he also enjoys exploring what goes into making them. “I play a lot of games, so I've always been interested in game design. I want to be a game developer, so I've been looking for more experience working with software,” Zach explains.  

That's where Avon’s AIP program comes in. It allows for students like Zach the time to explore an area they are interested in that they might not otherwise get to through standard academic curriculum. It also offers the chance for real life experience in the specific field Zach is hoping to pursue a career in. Students who participate in an AIP come away with a boosted resume that gives them a head start in the field they hope to study in the future. 

Zach plays squash and tennis, but has an open afternoon activities slot in the fall. He, along with AIP program director Cristina Pinton, saw this as the perfect opportunity for him to pursue this project. “He spent months independently planning his project before proposing it. You could really feel his passion for this type of thing,” Pinton explains. “This was a perfect opportunity for Zach, and it’s a great example for other interested students of what an AIP can be.”

For Zach, this was an opportunity he knows most students his age don't have. "Without this AIP, I definitely wouldn't have gotten so in depth or have seen the processes actual companies use," he said. He worked closely with computer science teacher Evan Sayles to narrow down his project to focus on game design and photogrammetry, which is the process of taking overlapping photographs of real-life objects to create a 3D digital model of that object. 

In the first few weeks of the fall season, Zach spent a couple of hours every afternoon gathering data. This meant taking hundreds of detailed photos and videos of various objects around campus. He began small with the iconic Avon Boy statue, and eventually worked his way up to using a drone to capture the entire Pope Quadrangle. “His scans of the Avon boy, the residential quad, and the Diogenes entrance look way better than I expected from a free tool that was working with consumer-quality photos instead of professional photogrammetry tools,” Sayles says. 

Once Zach had his photos and videos, he set to work at his computer—a computer he built himself—turning the data he collected into digital 3D models. To do this, he used a software called RealityCapture and a little bit of coding. 

Once he was satisfied with his 3D models, he imported them into Unreal Engine 5, a computer graphics software framework designed to run video games. Unreal Engine is known for games like Fortnite and Tekken. He then created a first-person character and placed them into the 3D world he created with objects from around Avon's campus. The end result can be viewed below: 

When he presented his project at the fall AIP showcase in December, the crowd of faculty and fellow students were amazed by his work. Zach, however, isn't satisfied, and says he hopes to continue the project. "My original goal had a more immersive and involved experience for the user. I'd like to get to that original goal. Also, in the process I know I'll learn more interesting facts about Avon's architecture, which I find really cool."

Sayles says he knows this isn’t the end of Zach’s project, and looks forward to working with him further. “Zach's initiative, performance, and consistency stood out the most to me. It is very impressive for a student to undertake such an ambitious, multidisciplinary project with so little prior experience and still produce a solid prototype at the end of just one season. One thing I most appreciate about Zach is he's always looking for ways to improve his work. I expect he will try to improve his game by adding even more scans and expanding his campus map. He's pushing up against the limits of the tools he's using, but I know he'll have fun working on this going forward.”