100517 Project Management--Planning Session 1

Hi, time travelers!

We had a good meeting yesterday--see below. Please send any corrections, amplifications, etc.

In particular, please note the action items for everybody in

• recruiting
• goals
• target date
• meeting schedule

Allen

RECRUITING MORE TEAM MEMBERS?

Allen noted that although we have a very strong GC team on paper, it's been very hard to motivate meetings, etc. The others acknowledged the problem, but thought that enthusiasm will increase and this problem will diminish once the work on our Game becomes more tangible...which is just starting now.

Regular meetings should help, too. And we'll attempt to add videoconferencing to our meetings via Skype, which should make it easier for more team members to attend (even the very distant ones).

Allen requested we still be open to recruiting more team members, especially local ones, as new members might add new energy and otherwise "deepen our bench." The group was open to this in the future once we get a little further on making the development tangible.

Action Item: all team members to start thinking of any acquaintances who might be good to recruit.

EVERYONE'S GOALS

DeeAnn had suggested that we take a moment to query everyone about their goals for the game, i.e., how they'll know after the game is long over whether they considered it a success.

Melissa:

• wants working together with the GC team to be an enjoyable experience
• wants to be the "pathologist" for a game, i.e., wants to understand the inner workings of a Game
• wants to not be stressed during the final weeks leading up to the game

Allen

• will be gleeful if his harebrained little kernel of an idea results in an actual Game being run
• would like the Game to have some resemblance to his initial Doctor When/time travel theme

Wei-Hwa

• wants every participant to feel satisfied, like they haven't been left out
• no other personal goals

Sean

• wants the participants to "get" the story
• wants a game that is not competitive, but rather emphasizes fun
• wants the participants to not feel cheated by the non-competitive nature of our Game

Erik

• wants to "put on a show"--a heavy theatrical experience
• wants this to be a somewhat new kind of Game experience
• wants story and puzzles to be thoroughly integrated

We reviewed all the goals and were heartened that they seemed compatible.

Action Item: Other team members to email their goals to our Google message board

DETAILED PLANNING

We started planning the "dimensions" of the game:

Target Date: The group pulled the date 5/14-15/2011 out of its collective butt. But basically it was open to any weekend in April or May of 2011.

The team was quite open to running the game more than once. Two smaller runs might make a more engaging and immersive story experience for the players than one large game. And it might also make flow control easier.

Yes, this would be more work, but probably substantially less than twice as much work. And we could probably get some of the people who play the first weekend to volunteer to help with subsequent runs.

Melissa made an interesting suggestion to further increase engagement with the story/characters: stagger the starting times. For example, half the teams could be invited to start the game at 10 AM and half at 11 AM, almost as though we're running two separate, more intimate Games simultaneously but offset by 1 hour. This might also reduce the impact of any bottlenecks in our Game.

Action Item: All team members to review their personal calendars and to report on any conflicts they currently have on the books for April & May, 2011.

Duration: General agreement that our story line will require a full Game, i.e., 30-36 hours.

We are open to including a sleep period (probably between Acts II & III) if the Game and logistics allow it.

Number of Teams: Based on the experience of Ghost Patrol and on the continued growth of the Game community, we wildly guessed that somewhere between 60-80 teams will apply. There was general agreement to try to accommodate as many teams as we can handle...but how many is that?

As a first guess, we are leaning towards limiting each run of our Game to 100 players, 20ish teams. We also proposed limiting team sizes to 3-6 members.

Two factors that typically limit Game size are:

• venue limitations
• puzzle/activity bottlenecks

but we won't know those till we get a bit further into development. However, we suspected that smaller Games would be more conducive to engaging players in the storyline.

Budget/Fee: Considering the fees charged by comparable Games and Shinteki, the aging of the Game community (and corresponding increase in their disposable income), and the value we expect to deliver, we are targeting a fee of $500 +/- 50% per team. We are guessing a total budget of $15 - 20K.

Number of Puzzles: Although Ghost Patrol used 60-70 puzzles and Pirate BATH used a bathtub full, too, we suspect we suspect we'll only need 20-30 puzzles/activities/events. We weren't sure exactly how to layout the events, but Allen suggested that looking at the key plot points document might inspire some structure on our planning.

We acknowledged that making some of the puzzles optional can make the slower teams feel they've missed something and make the faster teams feel like they are being given busy work. But we found it hard to imagine how we can manage flow control without at least some optional activities. We will also keep an open mind as we go along to making some of the puzzles have variable difficulty levels.

Action Item: Allen to review the key plot points document and draft an arbitrary proposal for what activities go where so that at least we all have something to respond to.

MEETING SCHEDULE

We agreed to start a regular team meeting schedule. To begin with we will meet every other Thursday, starting with 6/10.

Action item: all core team members to block out those Thursdays in their calendars. Other team members are invited to join as well...even the distant ones since we will start bringing a laptop with a webcam + Skype to videoconference all the team meetings. (Note that Skype has recently launched multi-person videoconferencing.)

MISCELLANEOUS

• It might be fun to have a puzzle involving a name carved in a tree back when the Doctor and the Professor were in high school...of course by now the carving is much higher and perhaps distorted.

• We all agreed that it's far more useful to have the dry run use the "real" logistics, flow control, technology, puzzles, etc. So we should make sure our schedule requires us to get all that stuff done in time for the dry run.

• Allen to upload any missing documents to the wiki.

• Melissa suggested that when faced with a low-tech vs. a high-tech option on how to implement a certain puzzle/activity, we should favor the low-tech approach in order to reduce cost and risk.