Watch the Footage archive

Don't have a better place apparent to put this so... yeah.

Seriously, what was the point of fictional threat? He didn't exactly do much, and his site changed a total of three times.

This is the one and only time y'all broke sequence. It was originally meant to start as the beginning of a wall piece puzzle, but you guys found it two months early. Congrats?

Besides being AWESOME? (I wrote that too, BTW).

Originally it was part of the wall piece puzzle. Unlike finding the blogs, it's discovery was actual sequence breaking. You think that the password we put on it might have cued people in, but nooooo.

Wound up being a nice bit of Cthulhu foreshadowing, though.

If Sophie hadn't designed the phone system to have a fake "Disconnected" message, you would have been able to start that hunt before the puzzles were done being built.

No one told Sophie to do this. She didn't even think it was necessary. She is just thorough as all hell.

THANK YOU, SOPHIE.

Tom wrote:If Sophie hadn't designed the phone system to have a fake "Disconnected" message, you would have been able to start that hunt before the puzzles were done being built.

No one told Sophie to do this. She didn't even think it was necessary. She is just thorough as all hell.

THANK YOU, SOPHIE.

I got that impression from her. Go Sophie!

So, how was it supposed to work? And how were we supposed to find him?
(And, you know, how was it actually found? The only explanation I got was "Google-Fu". One had to be pretty specific to find that.)

Oh, and the pamphlets. Were we supposed to get them?

Originally, we actually were going to pay someone to stand in the park with a sign that said THE END IS NIGH and hand out fliers that lead to it. This is way back when we were over complicating the start of the wall piece hunt by wanting to have physical things start the hunt instead of Layer objects.

I can't believe we ever were shooting for that. We even got the rights to put up a poster in Kings Cross during this bout of insanity.

After that, it would have been much the same -- the Agent's note would have complained about that crazy guy who runs that "Fictional Threat" website.

Yeah, that was...one of our lessgood ideas.

If you see Fast Eddie, thank him for talking us out of that. If I remember correctly, we didn't see the light until WAY to late. Like, the game was already rolling.

But once he suggested using Layer instead, it was SO OBVIOUS. I mean, the design -- with the Mr. A images in the comics -- already called for players to return to those locations.

Connor Fallon wrote:Besides being AWESOME? (I wrote that too, BTW).

Hey, I added some of that. I even reread Time Cube in order to get into the proper mindset.

Rick Healey wrote:

Connor Fallon wrote:Besides being AWESOME? (I wrote that too, BTW).

Hey, I added some of that. I even reread Time Cube in order to get into the proper mindset.

This is true. Much of the second wave came from Rick.

So we are both awesome.

Dryunya wrote:(And, you know, how was it actually found? The only explanation I got was "Google-Fu". One had to be pretty specific to find that.)

One of you guys found it by searching our IP address for any sites hosted on our server, found fictionalthreat, found a password wall. The player decided that the game wanted him to check the google cache. I'm not sure if this was before or after the phone hack, so I don't know offhand if we bear some of the blame for teaching that skill.

We would never build an ARG that relied on players checking the Google cache. The Google cache is too far outside what we can control.  We wouldn't want to risk it updating at the wrong time and locking the players out of something important.

The story could have been damaged if Sophie hadn't thought to fake the disconnect sound. Luckily, there were no discontinuities, so we were able to roll with it.

Rick Healey wrote:I even reread Time Cube in order to get into the proper mindset.

Truly the GMs have made great sacrifices in the name of greater immersion. (That's only a bit sarcastic; I would not read any more of Time Cube if you paid me.)

I love timecube!

1: the earth would fit into a cube
2: cubes have 4 corners
3: therefore, each corner experiences its own day

TOM

TOM WHAT ARE YOU DOING

STAHP

Alternatively, YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, TOM!!!

JackAlsworth wrote:

Rick Healey wrote:I even reread Time Cube in order to get into the proper mindset.

Truly the GMs have made great sacrifices in the name of greater immersion. (That's only a bit sarcastic; I would not read any more of Time Cube if you paid me.)

Well, I certainly did put in the extra mile for purposes of immersion.

To some extent, I felt I had to. Many of the writers got to stay in the mindset of their characters constantly. I kind of envied some of the others for that, because much of my work was synthesizing a sentence here and there in order to make sure everything connected properly, at least in terms of the overall plot. So I would generally go into deep immersion for when I did work on a character.

To be fair, it wasn't all that bad. My immersion for Cheshire involved finding one of my cats and playing with whichever I found first for about a half hour.