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One year ago this autumn, I reached the culmination of an overwhelming three months of creative work and collaboration when I designed, wrote and directed The Timekeeper’s Return, a story-based immersive treasure hunt set in Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter.
In this series of blog posts, I want to delve into the detail of how The Timekeeper’s Return was made, including an overview of how the event turned out on the day and the project’s legacy – for the participants, the Cathedral Quarter, and my own future as I continue to work in the area of location-based treasure-hunting games for my practice-based PhD.
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Testing
The lead-up to the event was
hectic and exciting.
In the month beforehand, I’d
officially started the first year of my PhD at Royal Holloway, and had moved up
to Egham where the main university campus is. So alongside finishing off the
writing for the QR codes and promoting the event, I had to juggle induction
events, first PhD supervisions, and settling into the place I’d be living for
the rest of the academic year.
Inevitably, this meant that the
writing took longer than it should’ve done, which reduced the time I had
available to test the game itself.
Indeed, as it happened, I didn’t
travel down from Royal Holloway to run a public testing session until Saturday 13th
October – one week before the day of the actual event!
It obviously wasn’t my plan to
leave testing so late. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from talking and working
with game designers of any kind, it’s that it’s never too early to start
testing, and the more testing you do, the more potential problems you’ll be
able to find and address before your game launches for real.
But in this case, not only did
the whole event have to be devised from scratch and iterated on in a short
space of time (less than 3 months), but my other commitments pushed my
deadlines back further than I would have ideally liked.
Thankfully, my testers gave some
very helpful feedback that pinpointed aspects of my writing and design that I
could fine-tune in time for the big day.
One outcome of the testing that I
didn’t anticipate was how much it would boost my confidence in what I’d made.
It was the first time the story I’d written had ever been aired publicly, and I
was worried that the testers would find some fundamental flaws in the plot.
As it happened, the testers said
that they found my writing style engaging, and when I asked the testers to
summarise the story in their own words, their responses showed good
comprehension of what I’d written. They freely mentioned parts that they
particularly liked, and were often keen to share interesting details about
Canterbury’s history that they’d learnt during the course of the test.
Another unexpected discovery from
the testing was learning how difficult certain QR code stickers would have been to
find.
In one example, my testers
particularly struggled with a QR code I’d stuck low down on a bollard by one of
the points of interest featured in the story. I was originally worried that its
position might be too obvious – after all, the landmark in question was
well-known to me. But what I failed to take into account was that the details testers had to notice
were located far from eye level, and also faced the opposite way to the
direction they approached the site from.
Of course, there was a balance to
be struck too, because the event was a treasure hunt. If every sticker was easy
to find, it would defeat the object of encouraging players to pay close
attention to their surroundings.
So in the small number of cases where
changes were required, in the end these only needed to be slight movements in
where the stickers were placed. For the bollard example, this simply meant
raising the height of the QR code so that when people spotted the relevant
details in their surroundings, they almost immediately then found the sticker.
Aside from these positioning
concerns, the testers observed that some of the QR code texts were quite
lengthy and could do with being more concise; that there were a few typos; and
that the wording in some of these texts needed to be a little more precise to
prevent disorientation, particularly when referring to buildings or objects
from the past that are no longer visible today.
Thankfully, these were all things
I could remedy satisfactorily before the actual event on the 20th.
One persistent issue, however,
was the appalling network coverage in the city centre – something Canterbury
residents and businesses are acutely aware of and frustrated by on a daily
basis. Of course, this definitely wasn’t something I could change in the space
of a week before the actual event.
So instead, I worked my hardest
to secure next best thing, which was to make free WiFi as available as
possible.
I designed some basic posters using the event logo that offered free WiFi
to ‘Mia Augustina’s research assistants’, and visited all of the businesses in
the Cathedral Quarter that had accessible WiFi to tell them what would be happening
(if they didn’t already know). I explained that it was in aid of the Cathedral
Quarter, and how they could play a big part in ensuring the smooth running of
The Timekeeper’s Return.
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| Free WiFi poster for Cathedral Quarter businesses |
Thankfully, nearly all of the
businesses I entered kindly agreed to display the posters, and to allow
participants to access WiFi and WiFi passwords on the event day, free of
charge.
It was another example of how the
Cathedral Quarter community came together during my time working with them, and
helped to address one of my biggest concerns in the lead-up to the event.
From this point, all that remained for us to do was
to get the word out about The Timekeeper’s Return to as many members of the
public as possible.
The next post in
the Making the Timekeeper’s Return series examines our marketing of the event, and the coverage it received.
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