Well, it’s been a while since I wrote, and working title “escape suitcase” is moving — a bit slowly, maybe, but still, it’s moving.

One thing that I am noticing is how much the fact that I have to slow down to physically make things gives me opportunities to think about the design of the project and let things percolate.

I am also noticing, importantly, the limits of my ability to document. Documentation is great until it’s getting in the way of the work, so I have had to make some compromises about recording design conversations, for example, because I’m in a room full of flying sawdust and it would be silly to ruin a recording device that way, or to make someone listen to a saw blade and then discuss whether we have to cut it more before turning the sawblade again. So, where documentation was getting in the way of my ability to do the work, I either didn’t document or delayed documentation. Some parts are lost, but it’s still way more than we usually get from the design process, and there’s already so much lost as my brain continually works out small problems or thinks about the project without my volition.

A problem area that I wasn’t expecting is power sources for my theatrical light-up and vibration patches. So far, the tech works fine when plugged into my computer. I bought batteries that should be able to do the trick, but the tiny USB LiPo charger that I bought on Adafruit just isn’t cutting the mustard. So, instead, I bought a larger charger (after doing some research, and at great expense), but while it has ports on the balance boards for 2S (2 cell, essentially) through to 6S LiPo batteries, it does not have 1S ports.

So. I bought batteries. Too small. I bought new batteries. Couldn’t charge them (or so I thought at first, because they just weren’t being supplied enough power). I bought a charger. Still can’t charge my batteries.

I am currently testing a non-ideal solution with the tiny Adafruit USB charger. It turns out there’s a spot at the back that you can solder closed to make it give 500mAh instead of 100…That’ll be 5 times faster but still mean 5 hours (I’m guessing?) for charging 1 battery. For now, I’m returning the charger I bought and will keep looking at solutions, including buying more batteries and maybe a different charger.

We’re into the fiddly bits of the project, like whether to cut wood 2 millimeters in one direction or another to hide certain secrets better, or into designing cases for the various boards that need to be screwed into the suitcase. That stuff, though occasionally time-consuming, given the 3D modeling and printing involved, is going fairly well.

So, finishing the actual suitcase (sanding and hardware, maybe drilling a few holes for power supplies) is still on my task list, along with soldering and making these conductive patches, finding a solution for the batteries, finishing programming for one of the puzzles, and writing the rules/frame for the game.

Oh, I also wanted to mention something really nice that happened! TAG now has a design conversation group that meets every Wednesday — which is also really nice but not what I wanted to mention. At a previous week, I had mentioned my intent to use a kind of web-based Konami code for one of the inputs I was building, and Pippin had offered to help if I ran into trouble. So, the next week, because I am very busy with teaching and a SSHRC Connection grant, I hadn’t had the chance to make much progress. Later on that day, Pippin talked to me and had made a small, stripped down version of the program that I needed! It kind of felt like someone bringing you a coffee when you’re tired or sending you a card when you’re feeling down. I really appreciated it, and it reminds me of how important community and friendship is, even when working on ostensibly solo projects.

That’s one thing about these projects: I worked on them in three very different ways, from being isolated and alone in Fort McMurray on Flip the Script!, to wanting to forge ahead alone and be as independent as possible for TRACES, and needing to learn to ask for help, to recognizing for this untitled game just how much having people to turn to while making TRACES mattered, and making collaboration a clearer part of this project, knowing from the start that I wouldn’t be able to do an adequate job of all the woodworking alone.

Back to the title of this post: recharging my physical, Lithium Polymer batteries is one problem that I’ve been having, but it also definitely refers to the feeling of being overwhelmed by work right now, and not wanting to burn out again, like what happened while I was working on TRACES. It’s not the dissertation that I’m pushing too hard on, though! It’s stress from other areas — teaching, writing grants, planning a conference, my spouse being in the market for a new job but also being close to burnout himself, continued nonsense with his old employer… Anyway.

I am trying to be really careful, but there is definitely pressure to overwork: my students need feedback and need my time to be able to continue their work, QGCon attendees and team members are relying on me to try and get as much funding as possible, and there’s time pressure to finish my PhD because my funding will end in the spring. I’m saving what I can, but since my spouse is currently on Unemployment Insurance, there’s some worry there too.

This is just a small update because it’s the kind of thing I’m likely to forget in hindsight. I just spent about two and a half hours on the internet and on the Adafruit website figuring out a way to make my patches more visually appealing and provide more feedback. There’s still going to have to be some work to do to get all these wires to behave, but hopefully I can manage something compact and safe (I’ll be using lithium ion battery packs for part of this). I’m especially concerned about shielding the lithium ion batteries.

Generally speaking, my plan is to sandwich a few things together. I’m hoping to make a flora power neopixels and a small vibrational motor. I have to handle where to place the LEDs and the motor and where to run their respective wires, then where and how to shield the battery while maintaining access to the flora (maybe some kind of slit in the material). I also have neopixels that I want to shine through part of the material. Then, there’s the wire to actually turn the patches into buttons, which has to attach into the conductive thread at the back. It should work out fine but there may be some trial and error.

Meanwhile, the box is nearly done, though I may need to add holes to accommodate some of this hardware… We have to make lids for the inner boxes and assemble everything with the hardware. We also have to make a handle for one of the outside puzzles. From there, most of the puzzles are already done and ready to go except for this last one, which is more involved. I have some re-writing and adjustments to make to the prototype of the puzzle, which I plan to try and do today, and I have physical crafting and embroidering and arduino programming to do in addition to the program that will display all this text and cycle through it. I thought I would want to do this with a visual/WYSIWYG program like Construct 2, but it might be easier to just have the RPI boot up and start the program if it is javascript-based.

I’m off to try and rewrite the last puzzle to make it a bit more of a riddle! We’ll see how it goes!

Really, this should be three blog posts, but maybe I’ll just fold it all into one. It’s been a while since I had the chance to write (over a month) but I haven’t been idle! There are three major things I want to write about that I feel are especially relevant to my design practice and what all I’ve been up to, and a few minor things.

First, I had a surgery that was supposed to happen in July delayed at the last minute until this Monday, the 19th of August. This is probably a good thing — it means I am missing out on certain things (like, for example, giving a talk at MUTEK and going diving on one of my favourite shipwrecks) but it also meant I was in decent shape for things like Artcade, where I most recently showed TRACES. That went really well — it was a perfect test case for an actual party, and although I couldn’t interview everyone who played afterward, I did have a notebook for people to write comments and feedback in, and I encouraged people to write if they wanted to. So, I did collect some data at the playtest both through my own observations and through what people chose to write. The feedback is incredibly encouraging and heartening, and was also consistent with some of the common threads in the previous interviews regarding where people thought the design could be improved.

I’ve also been plugging away at the design work, and I have most of the design sorted for two out of the three multi-step puzzles I intend to include in the escape suitcase. The one that I don’t have sorted is the one using conductivity and sequence puzzles. I think the other two just need to be built, basically, and I’ll eventually have to get part laser-engraved for at least one of them.

I have plans to meet with Tom’s mom to design the suitcase. She is a hobbyest woodworker and has made some very beautiful pieces. In the past, she’s helped me build a treasure chest for my nibling that we filled with costumes. Now, I have access to a gigantic woodshop at Concordia if it turns out that I need it, but in this case, I am valueing the chance to spend time with a loved one over working with big tools in a shop that, while friendly, is also still a bit alienating. Or, if not alienating, not what I want to deal with at this time. Honestly, everyone I’ve met there is very friendly, but right now, my executive functioning is such that arranging the meetings with the technicians, having to make technical drawings, and all the rest, sounds like a bad time. But, good to know that they probably have every tool that I need if I do need access to something extra.

From July 27th to August 3rd, basically, right after Artcade, I participated in my yearly creative reset button, GISH, and oh wow. I did a personal best on number of solo and team items! Our team completed 222 out of 227 items! I did things like learning how to make a deep fake, making a video game, and learning how to silk screen with serratia bacteria (which wasn’t a requirement for the item). Actually, the bacteria item was one of my personal favourites.

The goal was to make a bacteria portrait in a petri dish of Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine, and to tweet it at Melinda Gates thanking her for her work helping to vaccinate children. I contacted Alex Bachmayer, from the Milieux Institute, and I found an enthusiastic collaborator. Alex taught me about lab safety in the biolab, about how to prepare agar plates for bacteria, about how to paint using serratia, both freehand and with stencils, and then how to print on fabric with them…to make Jonas Silk (a pun we both found deliciously bad). It was really lovely to get to know Alex and to hit this item out of the park.

The other item that I learned a lot from was the Deep Fake, which was supposed to be Misha Collins complimenting Trump — I tried it two ways almost simultaneously. I had a friend, Drew, do an impression of Misha Collins fo the voice, but then realized that Drew’s hair and jaw didn’t look like Misha’s, and that the deep fake would only replace the face. So I had Tom lip sync to Drew’s impression, then replaced Tom’s face. The two ways part comes in here: I tried a software running on my own computer and an online server. I had no choice in the end but to use the online server — with more time, I think I could have trained the deep fake software I was using, but it was GISH, and there were other items to do. On my computer, Tom’s face was replaced with a blurry rectangle. On the server, I trained the thing three time before I wound up with our final version.

Other than that, I played and beat an escape room with my brother and Tom while in Toronto for a top surgery consultation, and got some ideas for my game about what I’m doing right and what else I could be doing. It was a fun one that I would recommend — the puzzles weren’t super integrated into the narrative and it wasn’t that immersive, but the puzzles were fun, fair and the right level of challenge. If you’re curious, it was the Wild West room at the Mississauga location of Escape the Six.

The next day, Tom and I, who haven’t been able to take a vacation this summer for a variety of reasons, spent the day at Niagara Falls. We did the Hornblower tour, which brings you right up to the Horseshoe Falls, visited Niagara Glen, hung around in the city a bit, and then took off to St. Catharines for one of the best Italian meals I’ve ever had — top three for sure. It left me feeling recharged and inspired to do some dissertation chores I’ve been putting off, like scanning forms and that sort of thing.

QGCon is also coming along! We announced our dates yesterday – May 23rd and 24th, so I’ll be spending my wedding anniversary running a conference. We also announced that I’m this year’s lead organizer! The team is really lovely and we’re doing great things together. I’m looking forward to it.

I don’t know how the next little while will go, because I’ve been pretty good about my rule of taking evenings and weekends off — I am definitely much more productive and recovering from the burnout I’ve been experiencing, but Monday is deviated septum surgery day, so who knows when I’ll be feeling up to making a wooden suitcase or working on game design. I’m also teaching again in the fall, so while I think I’ll be fine, scheduling-wise, it’s possible that teaching-related emergencies might come up.

Here’s hoping I’ll still be on track to finish the dissertation by the spring! There’s a good chance that I won’t be, but I’ll do my very best!

Well, it’s been a while!

Yes, I finished reading the Puzzlecraft book, and it was helpful for conceptualizing the kinds of puzzles that I want to put into this game.

I also decided on the number of puzzles: three multi-step puzzles. At first, I was looking at five or more, but I realized that I am hoping for each puzzle to take 5-10 minutes to solve and for a total playtime of 30 minutes, so that meant thinking about how much I could realistically expect players to do. Each individual step won’t take so long, but figuring out the clues and what they have to do will hopefully take enough time to be satisfying without being frustrating.

I don’t want to spoil anything about the puzzles, so I won’t write about them here, but there are three distinct ones and I’m decently happy with the “hybrid” aspects, which was something I struggled with before. The question I found myself asking was “why does this need any digital components” or, alternatively “why does this need physical components?”, but designing some aspects of the puzzles settled that for me.

One current challenge includes finding the right suitcase (but Enric has offered to show me a few that he has been collecting! Yay!), although I may make one myself out of wood because of the high degree of customizeability that would give me.

Another challenge, though I think I’ve nearly solved it (maybe!) is the narrative framing of the game. What’s the point and what are these puzzles about thematically? I want them to make sense. I think this is a game about “Opening Up” with a friend/to a friend/getting a friend to open up. Maybe. More on this as it develops.

So, I’m almost ready to start building prototypes. I’ve ordered some materials, including some locks, and a tiny touch screen, the new Raspberry Pi 4, some other stuff… It would unfortunately spoil some of the puzzles if I told you more about the materials, I think.

More as it comes!