Puzzle Design Team: Evis, Jacob, Yamilett, Ryan
Having the casino theme made things really easy for us to get started and plan puzzles through interactive subgames. We spent a lot of time researching how to rig games usually played in a casino, including Blackjack, Poker, and Craps.
Our group met a total of 3 times since class last week. The first meeting was more so for playing around with cards and seeing what we could hide and how we could trick people. There was no outline of a script yet, so there was not much we could do, as puzzle design is extremely reliant on the story structure. During our second meeting, we really got rolling and came up with a ton of puzzles for the first half of the story, i.e. the first fake murder. We filled in the plot lines and asked the script to add a phony doctor. During this time, we were also in communication with set design. We told them a list of props we were going to use for the first phase of the game and how we would like tables to be set up for the casino games we were going to rig. The third meeting consisted of us going over what we had and finalizing some of our main ideas for the first phase (we still did not know what happened after the fake murder, so we couldn’t begin work on the second phase).
We completed much of the work collaboratively, as we have an incredibly small team, so the benefits of dividing work are less prevalent. Also, we are currently still in the brainstorming phase of our duties, so working with one another seems the best way of handling our workflow.
Throughout all of our meetings, though we made much progress, we weren’t able to completely finalize an outline of all of the puzzles since we didn’t have all of the necessary story information to draw from. Still, we managed to create solid groundwork for the first section of the game, and now that the information about the story is out, we have plans to flesh out the second half of the story as well!
What groups we were in communication with the most:
As stated before, we stayed in communication with set design and script writing. These we believed to be the most important for our purposes. We also had a lot of communication with the rabbit hole group, as some of our ideas require more technical and media-driven implementations. One of our team members, Jacob, took up a meeting with Emily to discuss one of our puzzles that we are ending up reworking due to the complexity in implementation. More details about this are listed below. We also made sure to send other groups, like acting, our notes, just in case they would need something from it. These kinds of smaller meetings, we found, are going to carry this project to the end. Groups need to be in constant update with each other. We will also try communicating more in other group’s Discord channels to ensure we do not plan anything that is unreasonable to implement or against the vision of other teams in the future.
Puzzles we originally came up with:
Phase One: Character A fake dies
In this phase, players will participate in rigged games that will lead them to believe the Casino is a sham.
They will play:
- Black Jack
- The kinds of immediate winning cards are taken out of the playable deck and given to Character C
- Poker
- Royal Flush is rigged based on the number of players (decks pre-rigged by a 3rd party, like in the game Card Shark)
- Given for Character C
- Craps
- Character C will be given 2 trick die that will always roll a 7 or 11
- Horse racing
- With assistance from Transmedia…
- We will have a bar corner with a tv perhaps// computer set up
- We also are requesting some sort of fake newspapers that talk about the horses racing and urge the players to bet incorrectly when in reality, Character C knows who actually win
- This is also a chance for NPCs to interact with players more and give them information about the Casino, betting, and whatnot (whatever script wants us to relay to our players)
- With assistance from Transmedia…
After discussion with the Transmedia/Rabbit Hole team, Horse racing was deemed not possible, but we still liked to put the idea out there!!
We imagine that in this first phase, players also slowly discover that Character A is actually not dead. We also assumed that his first “death” is clean and his true death is messy and bloody (which is now confirmed!). With this, we could also incorporate a changing scene where the murderer changes his clothes or his clothes are found bloody and stained. Using the waitstaff and possibly a coat person (who theoretically took people’s coats, to begin with) players will be able to interact and overhear information we want them to get.
Jacket Plot:
With this, we want the players to realize that Character A is not actually dead. In the beginning, we will encourage players to leave their jackets in the “coat room”, with someone manning the station. There will already be a jacket hung in it, containing the fake poison used to stop Character A’s heart temporarily. In this case, we would assume that one of the playable characters is a chemist, and they would be the only ones to realize that this poison is fake. We lead this character to the coat room using NPCs and insider information revealed through conversation.
For example: if one of the players finds the vile in the jacket, the vile will read “see the chemist” who will then reveal it is fake.
In order to get the coat, the player will need to know the exact coat number. The coat number will be revealed from a time code based on horse racing (the fastest time the race is completed). The players will know what time code to refer to based on a mysterious card, secretly created by the phony doctor, given to them along with their jacket cards at the start of the game.
Changes after meeting with Transmedia/Rabbit Hole and script updates:
After we discussed with the Transmedia/Rabbit Hole team, it quickly became apparent that horse racing was not feasible to produce. First, horse races are too short, taking around 1-2 minutes on average. Because of this, in order to create the footage we would need, the Transmedia Team would need to edit an unreasonable number of these clips together, which would take far too much work for a small detail in the overall story. To make matters worse, the horse racing idea only works if there is a way to rig it to naturally provide a code for the players. The easiest way to do so with horse racing is to have the same horse win repeatedly, but doing so would make it even harder for the Transmedia Team to find the video clips they need. Lastly, the newspapers that we would need to share horse racing statistics are apparently really hard to print, which is yet another issue the Transmedia Team would need to deal with to make this idea come to fruition.
Because of these issues, we felt the need to brainstorm some new ideas to replace horse racing that are more possible to implement. In essence, whatever we choose needs to accomplish the goals of allowing the people to determine information about the story while relaxing a bit and not actively gambling. We also want to maintain our current idea of a “lock and key” situation where the players use this puzzle to get a password (the coat number) that they can use to determine more information (find the fake death drug in the jacket’s pocket). The Transmedia Team helped us come up with a few ideas for this already, such as a menu with hidden information that the jacket card could reference, but we have yet to meet and discuss formally.
Finally, after our last meeting, the Script-writing Team released more changes to the story, including who committed the actual murder! With these changes, we are finally ready to complete the second half of the puzzles. Though we haven’t fully fleshed these out yet (since they only released yesterday), we already have a clear understanding of the information our puzzles should reveal and some of the tools we can use. Some clues we can use to implicate the killer include a bloody jacket, security footage, and an identifiable item left at the crime scene. What’s left for us to do now is to create puzzles that will permit the players to discover this information and conclude who committed the murder.
