With Soft Opening this week, Lights Out has undergone some testing and changes that put us in a pretty good position for Festival and Showing Days next week.

At Soft Opening, projects show their deliverables to the faculty for feedback. We were able to have faculty members go through the experience for 7 minutes (a shortened version of what will be a 20 minute experience when we show it for real) and get their thoughts. It was clear that some of the puzzles needed tweaking – and that the wood needed a little work to not give people splinters!

The puzzle that needed the most work was smell. In its current form, there are many broken pieces of one disc that all have small vials tied to them, and the vials contain smells. The “correct” smell appears twice among the pieces and on the frame that would hold the pieces to make a complete disc. This was not only way too complicated of a process for most guests, but it was complicated in a tactile way, and the pieces tangled up a lot. The vials had corks in them, so it was hard to tell they could be opened, and without opening them, guests didn’t realize they were supposed to use smell! Even thought we had tested a version of this task before, we realized by the end of the day we would need to redesign the task.

The new task has several complete discs that are in separate cookie jars. Guests will be given a smell to come in with, which will match the correct smell, and the correct smell will be given as a sound cue as well. In addition, the inner ring of the incorrect discs won’t fit the peg on the door.

We left the story the way it is, but the sound underwent a lot of changes after our last visit from Alina and our softs feedback. We will have more narrations and we are adding environmental sounds (which also serve as clues) as guests approach each interesting station in the room. We found that it’s really difficult to remember the story after being submerged into a totally dark room, so we hope this will help guests remember where they are and what they are doing.

We also agreed (finally and after much discussion) to include light as part of the guest reward in the final room. Because the opening room represents a cold, dark heart and opening the door is a step toward warming it, it just fits our story to literally lighten the back room and show that the guests have really made a difference in his mind.

From design:

Based on the feedback we got at softs, we learned that the story is not clear and concise enough and there need to be more hints that help people do the puzzles and reinforce the story in the experience. Therefore, I worked on getting directional sound hints for each puzzle that involve the memories of the character. I also worked on the ending emotional narration audio to reinforce the finale moment of the experience. More reward sound effects were also added to the inventory to give feedback to the guests.

Also we began our video shooting process. The video will be edited and be finished next week.

Next week we look forward to testing our redesigned smell puzzle, our new sounds, and our final room as a full experience and showing it at Festival and our showing days!