Hi all, I hope you are all safe and in hopeful spirits. I am sharing an extended description of my game Time Hunter. The description includes materials and rules, you can also see my little game promo here The new description is also accompanied by a playtest document that explains how a playtest can be done and shows some tips from my first playtest of the game. If you are able to do it safely, I would really appreciate it if some of you tried the game and gave me some feedback on challenges, opportunities and that sort of thing. Bye for now
Hello @Highfather thanks for this, I really like how you incorporated @LizzieH suggestion in your design, I know that is only for playtest, but wow, there are two things that originate from that pivot: 1) narratively speaking it’s really interesting to use phones that we consider not so smart, as playing device 2) While I think it will be great to develop a suit for playing this with Arduino etc, with the phones you have a version of the game that is more universal and accessible.
Maybe the technology that you can try to focus first could be the tracking device that send the position of the Runner back to the Controller, ((Smart-)phone number 6?), so you can really scale up and go urban.
I really like the narrative about waves having trouble moving between different times and they manifest on txt vibrations, so maybe also the communication in the other direction, can be messy and following the same esthetic (using a old/dismissed technology that is able to capture the information instead of a smartphone?).
In term of the game mechanics per se -the treasure hunt- I remember playing Geochaching (Geocaching) that has this concept of little-micro time capsule that you can find (for REAL) around the world, something small and timetravel related could be your object.
Hi Matteo thanks for the feedback, I definitely would love to develop the game more using the lo-fi technology approach, would also show me what works and what could later be more fun with some technology. That said, I’d love to realise at least some version of the “time vest”, even if it’s just a harness for the phones, I’m driven by the cyberpunk aesthetic. The geocache would be a nice touch, lives me with somethings to think about.
hey Mark! Congratulations for your progress! And also all your recent activities - the conferences, TV shows with experts;)
I am not sure, if I got it right. Actually still using simple phone in these days (yes, I do not have smartphone, and I feel very cool about it ), I ask myself if you were thinking about the speed of instructions? How will you treat the mechanism so that it is not too slow to activate a phone by phone by the Controller (either calling them, or sending messages) - do you want to use the national network? Do you count with the call delay when dialling?
Hey Soly, really good points. The idea with the phones was just a shortcut to playtest but it became an attractive way to make the game more universal. The constraints you pointed out are very real, I faced challenges around these things during the playtest. In Namibia, I used the major Telco networks and it was quite fast but the phones also got messages and calls unrelated to the game that threw off the movements of the Runner. As @matteo_uguzzoni suggested, maybe I can focus on the Controller part as the technology perhaps moving this part to some kind of dedicated network. Also maybe I can instruct users to use dedicated numbers solely for the purpose of the game but I wonder if this is not asking for too much on the part of the players. Right now I’m still clueless on this but planning to do experimentations during lockdown.
PS: Thanks for the props
The new description is also accompanied by a playtest document that explains how a playtest can be done and shows some tips from my first playtest of the game. If you are able to do it safely, I would really appreciate it if some of you tried the game and gave me some feedback on challenges, opportunities and that sort of thing. Bye for now 
), I ask myself if you were thinking about the speed of instructions? How will you treat the mechanism so that it is not too slow to activate a phone by phone by the Controller (either calling them, or sending messages) - do you want to use the national network? Do you count with the call delay when dialling?