It’s been a busy week!

We had several visitors this week, including Scot Osterweil (MIT Comparative Media Studies), Patrick Curry (previously from Unity Austin), and Seth Sivak (Proletariat / ETC alum). They reminded us of the importance of story and gave some advice on balancing meaning with red herrings in a puzzle-based experience. We also met with Alina Striner (Disney Research), who is helping us work on our story because we had once again gotten lost in the mechanics rather than the experience as a whole. We are meeting with her again next week for more input.

We have also finally begun construction!

Dale already put together two of the wall pieces! At this rate, we should have a complete set of walls by the end of next week.

Another update: we are hoping that we will not need blindfolds as part of the final experience while it is in the ETC! We have looked at the room and found places where light bleeds in, and it’s mostly near the main entrance. We have redesigned the shape of the room as follows:

The cutout in the top right was originally so that we could open and close the interior / exterior doors that were there, but it also serves as a light lock. Combined with curtains over the main door, we should be able to eliminate enough light that our guests’ eyes will not adjust.

We ended the week with a playtest that included prototypes of the smell and sound tasks we want to include in the final experience. Overall, many playtesters were able to complete the tasks!

More about this from design:

This week, sound and smell puzzles were designed.

For sound, we had a sound effect pass code using a keyboard. Guests would press one button to hear a clue about the correct pass code (“a dinosaur is racing an angry crowd with a spaceship”). There was another set of keys that would play the sound effects representing “dinosaur,” “racing,” “angry,” “crowd,” and “spaceship,” which was the correct pass code. There were also sound effects like “Pikachu” as distractors. Overall, the idea of the sound effect pass code is interesting and fun, but the feedback needs to be more clear (a submit button might be needed). But this can be developed.

The smell puzzle turned out to be an interesting mechanic also. People had to complete a circle by combining the two half-circles that smelled the same. There were also other pieces present with the same shape, but different smells. However, we found that the smell needs to be even more distinctive, plus if we want people to realize that they need to use scent, we need to make that very clear. One idea we have for that is that the puzzle base also could have the same scent. The material of the puzzle also needs to be a lot more solid (this version was made of foamboard), which will be implemented in the future.

Next week, we will be iterating these puzzles with prototyping the wall-touch puzzle.

Next week we look forward to more construction and prototyping!