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 2

We continued to work on our Scratch & Makey Makey games to demo to Mike Salyh, a game designer on the corporate side of Two Bit Circus, who funnily enough is from my roommate’s high school (repping Sandwich, Mass - yes it’s a real place! And yes, they have Sandwich Police).

He gave us feedback on how to design alternative controllers. For example:

• Controllers that don’t look like controllers excite guests

• Controllers that have good translation from what it looks like to what it should do, to what it actually does is very satisfying

• If you have a wacky controller, there should be more mercy in the gameplay

• If a controller is frustrating to use, you should create more space to vent out frustration in the game

We each demoed two of our experiences to Mike. Of course, I demoed my Chicken Infanticide game and my Fishing for Phishing Scams game.

His comments on my Chicken Infanticide game:

• Nice experience

• Weird to use your face

• Maybe think about turning it into a rhythm game?

• Usability/visibility is a problem - need to make it easier to use

• Change to be STEAM themed 

• Ramp up eggs over time

• Creates great selfie moments

• Shareable + wacky - unique to pace

His comments on my Phishing game:

• Need to make more clear feedback when scame is got/not got - create a clear feedback loop

• Gameplay is solid

• Theme can do a lot of tutorialization

• Not clear if you’re supposed to get phishing scams out?

  • Do I want to get phished?

For the water controller:

• More discrete things with water because you want that to be the focus

• Not good for controlling specific things

• Could be an interesting controller for an escape room? - manipulating water on a board

Overall, it was really helpful to hear his feedback on designing our experiences.

This week, we also started getting ready for camp. 2BCF was contracted out by Hawthorne School District to provide programming for 12 days (3 weeks, M-Th) at a free summer camp for at-risk youth. We worked on developing our own curriculums to teach at camp and prepping our supplies at the warehouse.

This involved taking what we learned from Scratch & Makey Makey and converting it to a curriculum that is both teacher and student facing. As I mentioned in the previous blog, 2BCF focuses on professional development as well as engaging youth. The work that we create needs to be able to handoff to a facilitator to teach in the future.