Attributes Of Our Game
This is intended to be a repository of the ever-evolving list of attributes of our 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.
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.
