110331 Playtests and How To Work Together

Just 24 weeks to go!

Allen, Dan, Erik, Sean, Trisha, & Wei-Hwa met.

PUZZLE STATUS

Sean has drafted a list of high-level milestones with which we can categorize the progress of each puzzle. That way we can have a quick summary of the overall progress on all puzzles each week (and see if they're marching to completion fast enough).

• Wei-Hwa will implement this in the wiki as a new field in each puzzle's description and a summary report across all puzzles based on that field.

RECRUITING STATUS

Allen and Dan have identified the four online boards read most often by our target recruits and have posted on all of them as of this week. We'll see if we get any good fit responses.

HOW TO WORK TOGETHER

We had a brief discussion of how we should work together to make our efforts together most effective and pleasant. There was general agreement among those present.

• Allen will send out a separate email to the whole far-flung group on the topic.

PUZZLE IDEAS

Allen presented the germ of an idea for an activity in which players have to fill a variety of oddly-shaped hourglasses so that each empties in exactly 10 seconds (we could claim that it was necessary to calibrate the time machine). The idea was for it to be solvable through either trial and error or by using calculus to compute the volume of a solid. But we weren't sure if the flow rate of the sand (or water) would be constant. Just an idea to let "ferment."

Just to jog our memories we also reviewed a few ideas that we didn't want to let slip away:

• Having the teams pick professions when they sign up, such as scientist, journalist, investor, etc. This might just be some fun flavor...or we might give different puzzles (or versions of the same puzzle) to teams based on their careers. We just want to be careful that people don't feel "gypped" that they didn't see all the puzzles. Alternately we could ask each team to include at least one member of each profession.

• Having puzzles or events that require the collaboration of teams (perhaps teams of different professions). We might also have an event where the collaboration occurs through some disguising medium, such as a custom computer interface, so that one or both teams don't realize they're collaborating with a team rather than a computer.

• Having a team meet itself--a classic time travel cliché. Of course, we can't have them really interact with themselves. But perhaps we could videotape them during Act I, edit the tape appropriately behind the scenes during Act II, and then watch themselves in Act III as though the image is real time, but the players just can't physically get to their other selves.

Trisha and Wei-Hwa brought up the issue of where to place puzzles/activities that "compress" the teams back to all being at the same point of progress ("funnel" puzzles). They noted that we probably most need such events right before the ends of Acts I and II. But the plot as written doesn't include them.

We don't have an immediate solution. And we noted that we probably do *not* want all the teams attempting to recover the missing envelope at the same time (might spoil the feeling of doing something "special" for them). So we'd like the teams spread out for that activity...which occurs just before the end of Act I. Allen suggested that perhaps we could tell them that the machine had another minor malfunction while trying to send the envelope back, so they have to do one more activity--and that would be a funnel puzzle.

PLAYTESTING

We playtested the first prototype of Allen's "Balance Sheet" puzzle and the 2nd prototype of Doug's "Time Weave" puzzle.

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As always, please reply with your questions, comments, revisions, corrections, amplifications, etc.

Allen