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Final Exam: Campus Conquest
Date: January - April 2024
Role: Project Director
Location: Blackbox Theater, Student Activity Center at UT Austin
Skills: Project Management, Production Design
Campus Conquest was a themed experience created by Texas Theme Park Engineering and Design, a student organization at UT. It was the club's first time trying out a "board game experience". I was elected to lead the project as the Project Director, and the experience taught me a lot about project management.
Playtesting with students
Playtesting:
An experimental project like this is heavily reliant on play-testing to ensure smooth run-throughs for the paid guests. I was very excited to invite my Professor and classmates from the design course I was taking, Play Design Lab, to playtest our project and give us feedback before our first ticketed slots. It was extraordinarily helpful in showing us how much time was needed for different puzzles, how many game pieces each team should get, and other specifics.
Challenges:
1. Project Management: This project was a brand new type of themed experience from TxTPED's past projects, and the project management structure needed to reflect that. Although there were still leads for each sector of the project: set dressing, puzzles, marketing, and others, the team was also broken up into four teams for each of the themed four corners. The corner teams would check in with the set dressing and puzzles leads as they created their corner, and the leads would check in with the Co-Managers and I. We managed the progress through Mural, Google Drive, and Google Sheets, and communicated using Discord.
2. Marketing: One of our biggest challenges with this project was marketing it to students. With our past projects, students and interested guests knew exactly what they were paying for when they saw the words "escape room" or "haunted house". With this project, however, our concept of an "immersive, giant board game" was not obvious. Our ticket sales were extremely low leading up to the build days, but once we had a build set and marketed with photos showing the set, special effects, and guests doing the experience, tickets skyrocketed.
Above: The timeline shows how each team was kept on track leading up to our build and run days.
Overall, Campus Conquest was a huge success. We sold over 100 tickets, broke even on our spendings, and were even featured in an article in the Daily Texan, a student newspaper on campus. The experience taught me how to manage a project from beginning to end, how to problem solve and deal with unexpected scenarios, how to motivate a team, and market new experiences. Shown below are images of some planning documents as well as the finished set.
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