2BCF: The Finale

This summer I forced myself to do the things that scared me. All summer long, I did things that I wasn’t good at. Many of my 3D prints failed. I started a small fire in the laser cutter. I tried to program games and found out I wasn’t really good at it. But I was lucky that I had the room to fail.

Two Bit Circus Foundation was my dream for so long, and it was amazing to have the opportunity to work there, but what was truly exceptional were the people that I got to work with. I actually liked going to work every day, in fact, I looked forward to it. I felt heard as an intern, I had room to grow, and I was surrounded by people who pushed me to be a better designer every day.

I also picked up another hobby over the summer to get over my fear of taking risks. I started going to acroyoga with my co-facilitator Max (featured selling his body for good behavior during Week 3) during my first weekend in LA, and ended up falling in love with it. It pushed me outside of my comfort zone, forcing me to get over my mental block of being afraid of failing. It takes commitment to what you’re doing and also a lack of fear to succeed. It also takes strong communication and trust in your partner to support you. All of which are fundamental skill sets to being a good designer and teammate! I fell on my face a bunch (left LA with a grass burned face), but I always got back up again.

I’m super sad to be leaving LA, but excited to have made so many friends and learned so much along the way. It’s not goodbye, but see you later Two Bit!

Featured: Milo (2BCF’s unofficial mascot), myself, and Max doing acroyoga in the instagram booth at the Two Bit Circus Microamusement Park

2BCF: Weeks 9 + 10

And just like that, we got to the last two weeks of the summer. We pivoted back to our Space Squad game that Aubrey and I were designing, and brought the entire team of us onboard (no pun intended). 

Jacob worked on programming the game, while Aubrey and I learned more fabrication skill sets. Sloane (graphic design intern) and I also worked on creating art assets for the game. And I also worked on trimming down the script.

My goal was to learn how to laser cut by building a cardboard prototype of a docking station for the PC laptop that would run the experience. The goal was to build something that looked alien/spaceship-like to cover the laptop with. It would need to hide the Makey Makey as well.

With my first laser cut, I accidentally set a tiny fire… whoops! I learned the hard way that lowering power AND speed actually makes no difference, only one variable should be changed at a time. From my experience, I learned that laser cutting is a lot of trial and error to figure out the right settings for different materials.

Baby’s first laser cut project on recycled cardboard!

The downfalls of small laser beds.

In addition, the laser cutter that we were using had a small laser bed. Which meant that I had to constantly adjust my design to fit in the cutting area. While this method was clean and precise (when it worked), it didn’t allow for me to build as large of a design as I had wanted to. I was limited to the laser cut bed size for my design. Also, since the program that we were using didn’t rescale exactly, sometimes my pieces wouldn’t fit together well.

But it was a really fun tool to use because it allowed for rapid prototyping. It was much easier to make design choices when I could see and hold the piece in my hand.

Second prototype of docking station.

Control panel cardboard prototypes done by Aubrey, button box and alien symbols done by myself, Jacob’s arms programming furiously.

Aubrey worked on building on the control panels for the experience, and by the end of Week 10, we had a fully working prototype!

We playtested with the Director of 2BCF, Leah Hanes, and with designers from the corporate side. Nigel Randall, who is an ETC alum, and game designer at corporate, played our game and gave us feedback.

Interns Jacob and Hannah, flanking Leah Hanes, Director of 2BCF as she tries to navigate our new game.

Graphic Designer Lauren, Game Designer Nigel, and Director of Innovation Justin taking a photo during the data transmission finale.

Positive comments:

• Visual effects of fabrication

• Sound effects - meow

• Mouth visual effects

• Button mashing most fun part

Negative comments:

• Less text, more imagery

• Mouth moving inconsistent - could use polish

  • Could attach to another gameobject to handle that

• Idea of how good or bad that you performed

• Rocketship effect that she’s being uploaded back into force

• Add sprites turning? ← add more challenge

• Negative feedback?

  • Impedes you?

• Title - rank that you earned

  • Her distance traveled back to Alpha Centauri?

If I had more time, I wish I could’ve fully prototyped out the docking station. I had wanted to do some arduino tutorials and learn how to add LED lights and moving components. I had also wanted to fabricate it out of acrylic and add hinges to easily remove/transport. I also wish that we could’ve had time to playtest with kids and see the experience in action. But time flies when you’re having fun!

2BCF: Week 8

We tested our 3D print pen “escape room” at Beta Night and it went spectacular!

Justin Case: License to Print is a Story Room Experience to teach students how to use 3D print pens. Students build tools using 3D print pens to unlock a series of puzzle cases.

Justin Case was the name of our Story Room franchise, similar to James Bond. Our fabulous graphic design intern, Sloane, made these wonderful James Bond inspired posters for our experience.

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In our experience, guests were newly trained agents sent in to recover the Venus de Milo’s...arms. See video starring the lovely Kate Le aka Agent 3Printio for an explanation.

We were able to have Brent Bushnell (CEO/co-founder of TBC), Mike Salyh (Game Designer @ 2BC/Co-Founder of Coin Crew Games), and Wyatt Bushnell (Co-Founder of Coin Crew Games) playtest our experience before we opened for the night. And we closed the night with CTO/co-founder Eric Gradman and corporate staff.

They really enjoyed our experience and were impressed by the originality of the puzzles. They said that they had done many escape rooms before, but the way that we engineered our experience was unique. Might have something to do with the lack of experience that I’ve had doing them? I’d done literally two escape rooms prior to working on this project, and one was designed by their team. Guess there are some benefits to not being that well versed in the field!

Something that I’ve felt very self conscious about since I joined the field of entertainment technology is my lack of familiarity with the field. I don’t play games and I didn’t grow up going to amusement parks. My parents didn’t believe in buying things, but rather investing in cultural experiences. I traveled a lot as a kid and went to many museums. That’s something that I still adhere to. I don’t keep games on my phone, I prefer to spend time talking with my friends over a nice home cooked meal, and I spend my money booking last minute flights around the world. So while I don’t always get all the pop culture game references, I still believe in creating experiences that bring people together and teach them something new.

In the first 20 minutes of the night we were booked! By the end of the first hour, we had a waitlist for our waitlist, which was pretty incredible. We were putting through about 5-6 people every 20 minutes (5 minutes for onboarding, 10 minutes for the experience, 5 minutes for debrief/reset). The experience had originally been meant for 4 guests, but it was so popular we had to put in more guests.

I spent the night onboarding guests as well as talking to industry folk about our experience. We had expected to be able to take turns running the experience, but it ended up taking all four of us interns working through the 4 hours to keep the experience going.

We had a slight hiccup after the third playtest when one of our puzzles broke. But luckily we had planned for this contingency. The puzzles were not fully dependent on each other and could be easily taken out of the experience if something were to break.

Being able to demo to the public among many other professionals in the field was amazing! Overall, people loved our experience. I overheard many guests at the bar telling each other that they had to go try it. According to our supervisor and the CEO, we were one of the most talked about experiences of the night (which, I’m still trying to figure out if they were trying to flatter us?).

Despite how jenky the whole puzzle set-up was, people loved the originality of being able to build their own tools to unlock puzzles. They enjoyed having agency in the experience (no pun intended). Some positive feedback from the debrief included:

• Guests thought the experience was fun and clever

• Guests enjoyed making tools with the 3D print pens

• They liked our characters (Jacque DeLuxe aka Jacob Surovsky was tied up in the room and giving hints/monitoring the experience) and the storyline

• Guests really enjoyed the badge puzzle (During the onboarding, guests practiced using 3D print pens to draw out their badges on a template. At the end of the experience, the last puzzle required that they use their badge.)

For negative feedback, most of the comments were out of our control. For example, the lighting in the room, the smallness of the space, and the parking situation. Guests actually wanted the experience to be longer and for it to be more challenging, which we can’t do because of thru-put in the classroom and our target demographic is much younger.

Brent Bushnell came by the next day to give us more feedback:

• Loved making the hook and the use of the badges at the end

• Liked the conductive wire puzzle

  • Learning escape room, maybe take 2 hours but you could be learning about circuits

• Jokes in the video were good

• Video was like maybe 20 seconds too long but that was

• The red herring joke was a good one

  • Not generally a good thing but they helped to add reality

  • Good set pieces

  • Such limited info, you have to pour over everything

• Number of things where he felt like he’d done it but didn’t get the feedback to feel like they’d done it

  • Circuit one

  • Spring load it or something

  • More direct feedback

• “Did I solve it and it didn’t work or did I not solve it?” - More confirmation

• Facescanner was amazing

  • Loves that you have to 3d print

  • Thought it was funny that it wasn’t an AI

During our team debrief, we actually had more criticism for our experience than guests did. There were many things that we had wished had gone a little smoother, and had been built a little sturdier. We had only a week and a half to finish up our experience, and some of the puzzles were not as well tested as we had wanted them to be.

In our post-mortem we discussed:

• Simplifying the onboarding process

• Fixing the circuit box puzzle to be less hackable + adding in a spring loaded mechanism

• Making the boat puzzle box (that I created) easier for kids

• Making the final puzzle more sturdy

• Creating more opportunities for guests to build tools that require teamwork

Given that we only had two more weeks left of our internship, we spent this week documenting the work from this experience on Instructables and preparing it for handoff to future facilitators.

Overall, we were happy with how this experience turned out. Yes it could use a final professional polish, but what we ended up handing off was a strong proof of concept for further development.

2BCF: Week 7

I worked on designing and building a new puzzle box for the 3D print pen escape room. The original idea had been to use something similar to a verification symbol on money bills. On one side is one symbol, on the other side is another symbol, when the bill is held up to the light, the symbols align to form a number. I wanted to create something similar using the shadow of a 3D printed object.

I envisioned a small box. When the box was opened, a light would turn on and shine upon a symbol printed on the inside top lid. When the 3D printed object (made from another template) was positioned correctly in front of the light, the shadows would create the outlines of an image that represented a four letter word. I wish I had a picture, but I was using the flashlight on my phone.

This method, while cool in theory, was difficult to execute without the right materials. For one, we needed a strong point light inside the box. And also, if the guest were to incorrectly print the template, it would never align or form a recognizable image.

So instead, I decided to 3D print the base of the symbol instead, and to add the template for the corresponding symbol in the beginning preshow training. This way, guests weren’t held up during the experience by the printing process, but could see that their badge aligned neatly with the symbol.

During early playtesting with kids, we found that we needed to add an additional clue to the inside of the box to show that the symbol was supposed to convert to a 4 letter word.

I also this week rebuilt a cleaner version of one of the puzzles to make it easier to reset. The older version didn’t have a hole in the back to easily replace the key and remove scraps of plastic filament that got stuck.

At the end of the week, I worked on writing the script, filming, and editing the preshow video. This was a really fun experience! One of the facilitators who was trained in acting came and performed the experience for us. Working on the preshow video made me realize how important it is to be short, concise, and clear.