If you followed Mysterium this year, you know we put together an activity called “Escape the Age”. This idea came out of a much smaller scale activity from Mysterium 2013, in which attendees were put into a room that had been converted into an ‘age’ and had to find the linking book home. Both were, in part, inspired by so called “Escape the Room” games that exist both online and in the real world.

For 2015, we wanted to take the concept and throw a real budget at it to make something that could really react to the players and provide fun and useful feedback. It wasn’t perfect, it occasionally broke, and it was too hard to solve in the time allotted… but still, every single person who played told me that they had a ton of fun. The main thing that they asked was that we release the documentation online so that they could see how it all worked. So that’s what is happening here.

A small disclaimer before I start: most of this documentation was written weeks or months ago, and the game changed in various ways since then. As with all game design documents, it was obsolete the moment it was typed up. If you read through the documents, you will find discrepancies and errors. I have tried to make small annotations here and there, but for the most part they are as they were originally written.Continue reading→

I forgot to mention in the last post that we will be streaming parts of the convention on Twitch! You can find our channel at http://www.twitch.tv/mysteriumcon

We won’t be streaming all weekend, but we at least expect to stream all major events (opening/closing ceremonies and scheduled presentations). If you can’t make it, be sure to pop into the stream now and then and say “hi”!

It’s the post you’ve been waiting for!

The Mysterium 2015 schedule is now up on the site! Check it out here.

As usual, we have a mixture of presentations, group activities, and free/social time. Cyan’s Obduction presentation will happen at 2pm (Eastern Time) on Saturday afternoon, and will be streamed on our Twitch channel (as will all other presentations). As with last year, we don’t have a formal scheduled Marker Mission, but instead have an ongoing ‘Mysterium Adventure’ that includes finding the markers we’ll be hiding around the area.

We have a new presentation format we’re trying out this year. We’ve collected several folks who have been involved in game design/development for narrative and writing based games, and will be holding a panel-style Q&A/discussion with them on Saturday afternoon. The panel is not strictly related to Myst, but rather about general game and narrative development within these genres. If you have any topics or questions you’d like to see the panel cover (about themselves, their games, development in general, etc), please let us know by emailing info@mysterium.net.

We’re still nailing down the exact list of panelists, but here are two that we have confirmed:

First up is Andrew Plotkin, better known as Belford in the Myst community (or Zarf in the interactive fiction community). He is well known in the interactive fiction community, having made a bevy of games in the IF format, including the semi-recently completed Hadean Lands. If you were at Mysterium 2013, you may remember his presentation on his multiplayer text-based Myst-universe game Seltani.

Second is Ichiro Lambe, president of Dejobaan Games. Ichiro has been designing and developing games of all types for many years. Earlier this year, Dejobaan launched Elegy for a Dead World (free to Mysterium attendees), which is a game about writing (and reading) fiction while exploring dead civilizations. Prior to that, Dejobaan also released Monster Loves You, which is an interactive visual novel that allows you to live the life of a monster.

We’re excited to see what discussions come out of this panel, but we can’t do it without you! So be sure to send us those discussion topic ideas!

-Taniith, Mysterium 2015 Chair