Production
Planning for The Intern Game starts shortly after the completion of the previous years' event, so production for 2020 started in August 2019. We start our location scouting as early as possible to allow for booking large hub locations with enough lead time. Our planned route, east from Seattle towards Levenworth, brings us across the mountains into the more desert like regions in central Washington, a perfect area for an Western themed event. We selected an appropriate hub location, booked it and continued with the rest of our planning. Through the end of 2019 we continued with puzzle creation and some initial beta testing as usual.
- August: Postmortem, early next-year scouting, theme
- September: Movie nights (theme prep/puzzle seeds)
- October – March: Meet once a week, write puzzles
- Early March: START OVER
Late March: Conference Room BetaApr-May: Puzzle refinement & RC fabLate May: RCJune-July: Final touches & fabLate July: RTM
Early March 2020 brought on some drastic changes to the direction of the event, and after pushing out our decision as long as possible we made the choice to attempt to run a virtual event as there were concerns that even if internships weren't canceled there would be less interest in this sort of large scale social event.
- March 4 – Officially slip Beta
- April 8 – Officially cancel in-person event
- April 29 – Tentative virtual structure determined
- June 13 – Logistics Test
- June 27 – Content Test
- July 25 – RTM
Prior to the change we had a total of 31 puzzles in progress. A portion of the existing puzzles were able to be re-worked into a digital format. Others we created from scratch, and a rushed timeline to re-imagine the event digitally was agreed upon.
- Adapted: Big Farma, Cactus, Dead or Alive, Flowers|Your plants look thirsty, have you watered them recently?|, Do-Si-Do, Draw, Lassos, Look at this Telegraph, Rein or Shine, $#!t Talkin',
- New: Embarkation, Check, Please!, Cow Facts, Crosstalk|Build a tin-can telephone to limit future crosstalk. (Substitutes for tin-cans accepted)|, Huntin', Now That's What I Call Moosic!, Trapped, Washington Trail
There were a number of changes made to support the digital format:
- Team sizes were a bit more flexible
- Instead of a single weekend, 30 hour experience, the event was broken into two days over two consecutive weekends.
- There was no travelling component at all which meant that timelines and puzzle availability were largely dictated by teams.