A lot happened at the end! Festival was a great success! We distributed RFID cards at guest check-in, along with the badges, so that when guests made it to the fifth floor, they could interact with the Space Bridge.
It was quite the treat to see people interact with the installation over those four hours. It was relatively crowded for the narrow hallway throughout, which of course was both what we wanted and what we feared. However, the flow of traffic seemed just fine! People were moving through the area with relative ease, and yet we had someone at each touchscreen essentially constantly.
Most of the team divided our time either working the front to distribute badges in shifts along with the other wonderful volunteer staff who were helping run Festival at large or standing around the fifth floor to make sure the system itself was running as expected! Myself, I also spent some time in the back operation room. It was quite the view, seeing the screens moving around in that secluded room, knowing that there were crowds in the front poking around at it. I felt like the Wizard of Oz.
We also got codes distributed around participating Festival locations to give unlockable cosmetics to people if they returned to the keypads. Our artist put together these adorable signs to display the codes!
So, overall I’m quite happy about how Festival went. It was a good time, and the Space Bridge performed great! We did have one side crash right at the end… and the character data was tragically lost. But for the other side, everything was still intact. Regardless of the lost data, I can say that we had roughly 100 Gleebles running around on each side, for a total of a little over 200 (specifically, we had 108 on the left side)! Now, that isn’t a 100% Festival goer interaction rate. But it’s difficult to say what the exact percentage was. Perhaps we should have been more rigorous in our data collection, and more precisely tracked the number of attendees that showed up to collect a badge and all of that… Future developers for the Space Bridge, take note. But having a couple hundred Gleebles running around was good fun nonetheless.
Here’s the JSON character data for the intact left side of the Space Bridge, for those who are curious. And perhaps, if you made a character on that side that night, you will find your character represented here, in the data!
We also did an interview with Hot Metal Campus and so check out their article if you’re interested in reading more!
Well, I suppose that’s all for us. Now to clean up the Space Bridge and get our documentation in order!
Over and out for the last time,
The Intergalactic Buttoneers