Migrant workers from Siberia. Or how we built a quest in Slovakia in 4.5 days

On December 14, 2016, we flew to Kaliningrad to pick up a rented car, load the necessary materials and find ourselves in Banskaya Bystritsa in 16 hours. We worked 12-14 hours a day to complete the project on time and have time to leave Schengen before the visa expired.

But let's get everything in order. Under the cut a very long history of our trip.

Purpose of the trip

3 months before the mentioned date we were approached by a married couple from Slovakia. The guys wanted to open a reality quest in Banskaya Bistrita and turned to us for help. We are developing a franchise and work only with Russian-speaking partners; we have not yet grown to foreign support.

Igor and Svetlana moved to Slovakia from Moscow, tired of living in a big city. The city of Banska Bystrica is the exact opposite of the capital: small streets, calm and measured life, good beer, hot springs and the mountains around. It is the third most populous city in Slovakia, although only 80,000 people live in it and another 30,000–40,000 students. There were no quests in the city, and indeed in all of Slovakia there are only 3 quest rooms. The niche is free - you can open it.
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Approximately with such thoughts Igor came to us. As a result, we stopped at the opening of one quest - “Ghostbusters”. Mysticism, not scary, but a bit creepy. Difficult and diverse tasks. Atmospheric dubbing. Suitable for the first quest in the city. But the problem arose at the first estimate miscalculation - the local labor costs just cosmic money. For 1 business day we paid 240 euros to two builders! Finding an electronics unit that could poison the boards and reflash the controller is an impossible task. The partners had a problem even with an electrician, which had to be recorded in a week, and, again, the day of work with the wires cost 330 euros.

The same with the decorator / fake - although the quest does not imply detached hands and other dummies, the work of the decorator provides the internal atmosphere. The first room of the quest is a musty fortune-teller's dwelling, a little flooded, with old, overwritten certificates of its success and achievements. The second room in the story burned after the intervention of the ghost. All this can not be conveyed without decoration.

As a result, after the purchase of the franchise, the guys realized that they could not get off the ground and simply would not financially pull the project. And they offered us to build it turnkey. We did not have such a service, although we planned in 2017 to start producing partners with on-site electronics. We made a new estimate of fieldwork, a list of props and electronics, shook hands and began preparations.

Training

The second step to the construction of the quest, which goes after the search room, - this planning. We make a plan in Florplaner . Katya, our development department manager, is responsible for this. She completed more than 160 quests and knows what Quest House should look like.


This is a floor plan from Kati. The common area is highlighted with a purple frame. All the rest is the quest itself.

Important points when planning a common area:

• In each "Quest House" there are at least two zones for photos. On this plan there is a photozone with a logo and a photozone with a clock. The more confused you are with the common area, the better the first impression of the quest will be and the more viral you will get. People are now in constant search for a better place for selfie, give them several such places at once!
• Administrator zone with reception is located on the left side of the room. If there are more than two quests in the institution, the camera room is definitely allocated, from where the operator controls the game, gives hints and monitors the safety of players.
• In this case, we are losing a lot of space on the corridor to the bathroom, to be more precise: 7.77 m2. The ideal solution would be to continue the door to the toilet straight from the common area, but there is a load-bearing wall. But in Slovakia everything is difficult with these questions.
• Pay attention to what the client sees when he comes to you from the street. In our case, he sees the author's photozone clock. We insisted on not sparing money and making it as spectacular as possible.

Important points when planning a quest:

Here our task is to minimize the cost of the partner for repairs. To all quests there is a typical layout, which can only be adapted. Therefore, when selecting a room, we immediately critically evaluate it. Any partitions that will have to be erected are extra expenses for a partner. With this in mind, we try to minimize redevelopment.


For the wiring we make a separate plan with explanations.

The document for each item describes the type of wire that must be brought. Marked as it is necessary to withdraw, at what height and other details. Under the number zero is indicated the shield to which it is necessary to lead all the wires from each riddle. The same plan is made for speakers, feedback systems and cameras.

Go ahead.
We, as contractors, are responsible for electronics, riddles, props and scenery. Partners took over the general construction repair and purchase of large props: tables, chairs, cabinets and everything that is required and does not fit in suitcases. For this we have a list of props with photos.


To organize work and store information, we use Google Dox.

Everything. Igor and Svetlana know what to build, what to buy and how to place it. Then it is up to us to produce riddles and a general control panel.

"Hunters" - not the most difficult quest for electronics. It consists of 7 electronic puzzles, two autonomous puzzles without reference to the dashboard and the dashboard itself, which includes light control, sound and a control panel.


If you remove massive objects, then the set looks like this.


And here, for example, the altar from the final riddle.

We have not established streaming production yet, so we do every quest from scratch. It takes a lot of time, but we work without fixed costs and always know in advance how much production will cost. The electronics workshop is good, but it requires a steady stream of orders. We are planning to open our own workshop in March 2017.

But we digress! We make a shopping list, a special person goes and buys at once all that is necessary. Sometimes you have to buy something on the little things, but we buy 95 percent right away.

Further work is divided into parts: for the electronics engineer, for the prop man. In the case of the “Hunters”, the prop man produces the altar (its upper wooden part with the necessary holes) and takes on a bunch of small props: certificates, special locks, flashlights, prints, photographs, calendars, and even a ladle.

The electronic engineer begins with the shield and gradually realizes the riddles, one by one.

Team

The requisite has been produced, visas have been received, walls have been erected in Slovakia - everything is ready for our arrival! I represent the team that went to the exit itself.


The main character is Andrei, our developer of electronic boards. In fact, the production of the quest depends on it by 70 percent, not less. If we come, connect the flap, and it explodes, then we can turn around and go back.

Catherine Shvetsova, our decorator, answered for the beauty. Katya works in the theater and constantly helps us with props and decorations in locations.

For the organization of the process I was responsible, the author of this text, Evgeny Grishakov. I got tasks that others had no time to do: tinted something, threw wires, hammered in nails, worked with local builders and partners.

Route

The route was:

• By plane: Novosibirsk - Moscow - Kaliningrad
• On a rented car: Kaliningrad - through Poland - Banska Bystrica

The entire journey took almost 30 hours: 10 hours flights with expectations of flights, 4 hours of additional materials purchase and car rental in Kaliningrad and 16 hours journey to Banska Bystrica.

And it was just hell. The fact is that the Poles gave us a visa for exactly 7 days (this is a long history of “why”). Therefore, we had to urgently change tickets, get ready for the day and depart early in the morning from Novosibirsk. It turned out that if we subtract the road, we had literally 5 days to install all the equipment and scenery. It was very little, we planned to cope in 2 weeks. But, thanks to the Poles, we have done the impossible.

Why we did not immediately fly to Slovakia? The fact is that we had to take with us a sign and specific paints from Russia. It was not possible to load all this into the plane, it was necessary to make such somersaults. So even more interesting!

Construction Quest

We arrived, slept for 3 hours and rushed to the quest. We settled 30 kilometers from Banska Bistrita, in the town of Donovaly, a ski resort. There was either no housing near the quest, or it was indecently expensive. But we somehow, we have already traveled 1000 kilometers!


The first day we spent on drawing up a plan. It is said that 1 minute spent on the plan saves 10 minutes for implementation. We do not believe anyone's word, but decided to check. Saves! On the same day we made a shopping list and bought everything necessary: ​​wires, screws, paint, glue and other trifles.

Electronics

Electronics was the following plan:

1. We mount all the puzzles that are easy to mount.
2. Mount the shield and connect these puzzles
3. Run the flap.
4. Connecting complex puzzles
5. Configure cameras and feedback system

I connected between the 3rd and 4th points in order to prepare riddles with the builders: to prepare the base for the altar cover, attach the clock to the wall, pierce the floor and fill it with epoxy reed switches.

The shield consists of a control board (up to this point AVR was enough), an array of discrete input and output boards. The interface uses a character LCD and buttons. The interface of communication of all glands - IIC. RS485 with a proprietary protocol is used to connect remote consoles and modules.

As a result, the manufacture of electronics is reduced to the production of boards of three types and the manufacture of individual mysteries. The puzzles themselves are built on the Arduino Nano boards to save time and the puzzles communicate with the dashboard using discrete 5-12V signals.

The main idea of ​​the development was the complete autonomy of the system. Looking at how competitors write an application on a PC that controls the Arduino Mega, we decided to exclude the computer as an interface. The sound was carried out as separate players or as a single board computer with several sound cards. Script management is possible in the form of skipping current puzzles through the interface panel.

In the future, we plan to use a single-board computer on ARM as a control board with the ability to collect statistics on the company's server.




Scenery and Props

Work on the scenery is divided into 2 parts: the clock in the common area and the scenery inside the quest. The clock takes about 35 percent of the time, all the rest - 65 percent.

Conclusion

As a result, we completed the construction of the quest for 4.5 days. We had exactly 3 hours to walk around Banska Bistrita, see local sights and go to the bar. The company was made by our partners. We asked to call with us on the meeting of the Slovaks, but did not. But communication with the aborigines is always the most interesting part of the rest!




We left the Schengen area 4 hours before the visa was closed, spent a couple of days in Kaliningrad and returned to Novosibirsk. Tired but satisfied with themselves.