Over the last two weeks, the Lights Out project has made some serious progress. Walls have gone up, puzzles have been tested and built, cameras and speakers have been installed, and the story has been finalized (with the help of Alina once again!).

In the Lights Out experience, guests will be geared up with lab coats, which is of course what mind doctors like themselves wear. The mind doctors will be transported by a machine into the mind of a man who has forgotten happy memories over the years, becoming grumpy and selfish. If they can collect pieces of all the happy memories, maybe they can unlock his heart and bring him back to happiness. The machine is unable to pick up any visual memories and only works for 20 minutes, so the mind doctors will need to work fast!

Guests will be led into the room and their hands will be placed on a tree of textures, which will guide them like neural pathways to the four central objects in the room: three key memory pieces, and one door to his inner mind which will open with the three keys.  Once the final door is open, the mind doctors will realize that there are strings leading them from any point in the back room to one table, containing not money, but a key – the key to his happiness. They’ve turned the old man back into his happy, youthful self!

It feels better than it looks.

And these smell better than they look.

The underside of the desk

We will be monitoring the cameras from our secret lair and will speak with guests through the speakers in the room should they be doing something harmful or should they need help. We have yet to figure out what kind of help we will give, since we haven’t tested the full experience yet, but we will probably use scripted lines that are delivered based on what they’ve accomplished in the time that has passed thus far. We will also be able to release the two electronic locks in the room from the back room once guests complete the associated puzzles.

A camera watches from above

We’ve been thinking a lot about throughput for this experience – we have finally accepted that it’s way too large to store the whole experience, so we need to make it count when it is set up. We will be opening at the ETC festival, then having additional showing days for the experience until it is taken down after final presentations. Hopefully this will let everyone have a chance to go through it. But, if people cannot return for the showing days after festival, or if they are uncomfortable with a sightless experience, we have considered other options. Our main project room will serve as a viewing area for people who want to watch a stream of what all our IR cameras see within the room as well as contain pieces of our playtests and our current experience (with blindfolds!) if people want to challenge themselves without committing 30 minutes to one room. We hope that this way we can meet everyone’s needs and share what we’ve learned with as many people as possible.

We look forward to presenting what we have so far at soft opening next week and playtesting until we are really ready for Festival!