Finalising

It seems as though the work is getting a little one sided, I feel as though the group isnt doing as much as they should be as a whole. I felt that at the rate we were going nothing was going to get done so I had to step up and get the ball rolling for everyone. However the deadline is very close and we really need to get everything sorted. We finally have a solid framework to work around. All we need to do is make the clues/props and set up the opening crime scene. There has not been much blog work after the last post quite honestly because I have been so swamped with doing the work for the project. There has been quite simply too many things to even blog about. For example, the CD case, the emails, the story, setting up, filling gaps etc. A lot of this work fell on me to complete as I had the most solid grasp of what we were actually doing with the game. I did try my best to keep my journal and blog up to date, but eventually the workload just took over. Near the end of the game it was more a stage where we had to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Changes

Once again, we have changed our ideas slightly after another talk with Maggie. At the start of the project we said to ourselves that we really didn't want to do the same thing as everyone else. We didn't want people being lead to meaningless clues one after another. We felt as though this took a lot away from the experience we wanted to portray. Upon review, we realized that we had been leading ourselves down this exact path. We took a step back and decided to change our clue system. We simplified it down a lot and decided that the main clues that we would show the players would be using images. There are also the other clues within the office. Because of this we are now focusing our journey mainly on discovering the hidden plots of our story.

We were not entirely pleased with TJ's  script that he wrote so we made quite a few changes to it. We also began to create some of the intel that we wanted the players to discover. These including such items as emails between the Lieutenant General and John Key.

Talk With Maggie

After another talk with Maggie we realised that we were planning things a bit too far ahead of ourselves. We were aiming at completing the entire game. However  we found out that we did not have to finnish everything. Just give Maggie and Gabe a taste of what we wanted to convey to the players. We only have 30 minutes to present so we are simplifying almost everything. This is disappointing as I had high hopes and saw a lot of potential in our game.

I went outside to inspect the surroundings and found a billboard that could come in very handy for placing something like a QR code. Because we do NOT want to involve the public on any level with this game, I decided it would be a great idea to split the QR code in half. The idea of the particular clue would be to join the two pieces to reveal information about the terrorist. By doing this we also limit only people in BCT to be able to read the AQ code. The person following around Gabe and Maggie will have to have an app on their phone which can read these codes.

We also have started to put up posters around BCT about NZ army recruitment's. We wanted to do this emphasize the fact that our troops are in fact fighting with America in the war on terror. This is not highlighted in media a lot so we really wanted to make the BCT building feel that we are at war.

ATMOSPHERE

Today I thought it would be a good idea to go around the internet and find articles relating New Zealand with the war in Afghanistan. I found a gold mine of information on the nzherald website. I thought that it would really immerse players by being exposed to these headlines that have been popping up over the last year or so. It shows that we are in fact involved in the war on some level, and that the reality being exposed is not fairy tale. I want to scatter these around the murder scene to show how the cubicle has been ransacked and searched for information. By doing this, players will instantly make the assumption that it is terrorist related. On the papers I will scramble messages and highlight words. By doing this it will convey the idea that the man murdered was onto something big and that he has been obsessing about it. All these small details add to the overall atmosphere of the moment.

Fake Terror Threat, I repeat, FAKE!!!

Here's a video I made by editing an existing Bin Laden interview video. I used adobe premier to add text over the top of the video to make it seem like a legit threat against our country. This video will be used in our opening scene. I wanted to video to target New Zealand  and focus on deployment of troops to aid America in the war on terror.

For our bomb episode, Supa also went home and designed a program that we could use for the defusal. It works by using a combination of 4 numbers. When you type in a combination it will let you know if you have the right numbers or if you have them in the right location. You have 15 attemped before the bomb will blow up. The more attempts you make the faster the bomb beeps. We decided that we would not leave clues lying around to help with the number sequence, the bomb itself will be a completely separate game in itself. The main game will be to locate the bomb. The idea for the code itself came from a flash game that we found online.

Terrorist THREAT?

Remember my talk with Maggie, I realized that blurring the lines between reality and fiction is a huge aspect of this project. I came up with an idea today that does this flawlessly. I watched a south park episode a while ago where they re dubbed the subtitles of a terrorist video for comical reasons in regards to airing a picture of Muhammad on national television. We could do exactly the same thing, except instead of doing this for the purposes of comedy, we could use this technique in order to make viewers actually believe that terrorists are making bomb threats to our country. Most people cannot understand the language of Arabic so there is nothing for them to question the subtitles being presented to them on the video screen.

We have a rough idea of what roles we will be playing over the next week or so to get work done faster. I will be focusing on media to put together a video for the crime scene, TJ will be writing the journal and filling in parts of the backstory as to allow the players to understand whats going on. Supa is in charge of the programming aspect for the picture recognition and bomb sequencer, and Joseph is making posters.

More development of the story.

Yesterday we tried to set  our story in concrete. The back story is that New Zealand is sending more troops to Iraq  to fight the war on terror, despite the astounding amount of protest against it. In retaliation, terrorist have planted a bomb somewhere in the city in close proximity to the WT building. The government has found out about the bomb and has chosen to do nothing about it because it wants to win over the support of the protesters. The government did this because america promised our country a portion of the oil supply. An agent who went rouge has discovered this information and has tried to find and defuse to  the bomb. HOWEVER, the government has found and killed this agent. Aware of this impending death, he has dispersed his research throughout the area for players to find and decode where the bomb is. The government may know about the bomb, but they do not know where the bomb is. They will stop at nothing to prevent us from finding the bomb. At the specific locations that players will be lead to will also be classified documents that have been stolen from the government that give the background story of what has been going on.

To create an authentic feel I want to place all documents in classified folders like this one.

Constatints

With our idea we are going to encounter a lot of constraints which will greatly affect how our idea develops. For example, we wanted to stage a crime scene outside with fake blood, however this most probably will not be allowed. It is recommended that we keep it within our year group only.