Hi all –
(For those that don’t know me: I’m Lea; I used to be pretty active on this forum, mostly back on the previous board software, and I… kind of dropped off when I started a PhD program, as one does. So I’m a little out of the loop on the newest games but not a newcomer to IF.)
I’m in the early stages of designing “some kind of live-action game/theatre thing” for a wedding-like event. I don’t want to give too many details here because there’s a chance some of the attendees also hang out on this forum, but the basic idea is that, during a genuine fancy-dress party held at an actual museum, the attendees can optionally participate in a fictional heist of a specific object in a fictional museum that is conveniently colocated. I’m aiming for something in the vicinity of immersive theatre, LARP, and escape rooms – ideally:
- less “soup cans puzzle” than the average escape room: puzzles should be more like “wear a fake mustache to trick the guard” and less like “anagram the chemical symbols of the elements hinted by this acrostic poem”
- more interactive than the average immersive theatre: attendees should touch and manipulate real-world props and cause world-state change. I assume I will spend most of the dev time on this project in building physical widgets, and it’s also a one-time event with only a moderate number of attendees, so it doesn’t need to be re-settable and I expect there to be improvisation in at least some of the narrative outcomes.
- less “role play” than a proper LARP: attendees can play “as themselves,” and, as in my previous party games, gameplay should be amenable to drop-in/drop-out
As I said, this project is still early stages, and my next step is moving from “a bunch of loose puzzle ideas” to choosing and refining a few of them and tying them into a more specific narrative flow. This is challenging, but it occured to me that there are lots of great narrative and/or puzzle designers in the IF community and that I should consider trying to hire someone for a couple of hours as a consultant.
Might this be you, or do you know someone I should reach out to? If so, please reply/DM with credentials and consulting rates. (Regarding currencies and time zones: I’m based in the US, Eastern Daylight Time.)