announcements.

[vivariummods]

Hello, test subjects! Welcome to our first week of Vivarium, and thank you for joining! We have a few announcements for today, so please give this post a quick read.

✖ You may begin posting to the vivarium community. We have created tags for every character in the game, so please make sure that you tag your posts, whenever you create one or comment.

✖ We will be holding one AB Game every week, with our first one starting this Friday at 6PM EST. It will contain both the puzzle room and voting sections, and will be spanned over three OOC days and one IC day.

✖ We have decided that all characters will be given a "starter pack". This pack will be a simple drawstring bag, containing one water bottle, one loaf of bread, one can of baked beans (with an easy open end, so no need for a can opener), and a small pair of sewing scissors. This starter pack will be given after Calhoun finishes explaining the rules in this thread.
✖ This is a one-time, non-replaceable gift, so the food is suppose to last the character until they reach 9 BP to gain access to the cafeteria. As for the water bottles, they are easily refillable with the water fountain next to the cafeteria door. However, as of this time, the door leading to the cafeteria and water fountain is closed, and will open after our first AB Game. As for the sewing scissors? It's a little extra that Calhoun has thrown in, if anyone wants to start threatening/stabbing others for whatever reason. He thought people might appreciate it.

✖ Finally, we would like to hear your thoughts on how our first "puzzle room" has turned out, aka the Elevator. What did you think? Did you enjoy it? Were there some flaws you've noticed? What should we change for future puzzle rooms? Please let us know any thoughts you've had, whether positive or negative, so we know if it went in the right direction or not. Anonymous commenting has been enabled, so please do not be afraid to leave some negative feedback!

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please use our mod contact page and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

Thank you for reading!

Comments

[detectiveofthewest]

I liked the initial puzzle! The way the threads went was a lot more structured than I'm used to (e.g. not being able to move on to the next thread without finishing the previous one), but my tagging partner worked out well.

I was also worried about relying on the mods for answers about the environment, but they've been very responsive so far and the Google doc was quite helpful!

Are the puzzle room threads going to be unlocked at some point? Ema's shenanigans with the key and using Jake to plug the hatch sound like an entertaining read.

[blind_badass]

I also agree that having the google doc worked well for us to picture what was going on. Although the puzzle was a nice starter, I did actually have to sit down with a piece of paper and plot it out, which is what you want.

Having played both games, I was also surprised that what I thought might be coming wasn't QUITE what was going to happen. Which means you made it different enough for people who played the games to not be able to predict what's coming.

[vivariummods]

We will certainly be using Google Docs' spreadsheets for future rooms, so it's good to hear that they are well-received!

We also hope that it's a good thing that we have changed the first room in order to surprise players who have gone through both Zero Escape games. We've wanted something unpredictable so it didn't feel like we were just rehashing what the series has given us, and making it dull for players who were familiar with the games. We've wanted it to be fun and exciting (and especially new), so we hope that we have accomplished that!

[vivariummods]

We are glad to hear that you have enjoyed it! Thank you, and we hope that you will enjoy this week's rooms as well!

The Elevator posts will be unlocked, now that everyone has completed the puzzle, so we will unlock them in just a few minutes. As for future puzzle rooms, such as this Friday's, however, we will not be unlocking those rooms for a certain amount of time. We have specific reasons for this, and we will address this on Friday, when we put up the post. We hope that you will understand!