Sebastian Hall

A while ago us students at cmid were asked if we wanted to come up with something that could promote the newly started game festival Nordsken. The idea for the festival is part lan, part board/figure/card games and part theme that changes every event.

For us it was a great opportunity to take an idea all the way through testing, designing, production, organizing and everything else involved. We decided to make a treasure hunt game. The game is about a mythical creature that has collected items from reality and fiction and then dropped then all over Skellefteå. The players collect items by finding qr-codes or url‘s out in town. When the player finds the code, he/she can scan it to go to the link and take the item. The items give points, and the players with the most points win prizes at the event.

We wanted to target the game towards casual players. We gave the items comical names, nerd references and visual jokes. We involved some computer graphic artists studying here on campus and that has been really fun.

The game started last friday and there are 28 players that have registered and picked up items already so we are very happy about that. We are planning to release more and more items into the wild as the game goes on, culminating in the Nordsken event itself. The hope from our side is that players enjoy the game and that it gives them one extra positive experience around the lan event. We hope to appeal to all types of gamers and maybe even draw some people in to visiting the festival that wouldn’t have done so otherwise. Because the festival is open to visitors you don’t have to pay anything to participate or even win some prizes.

We are working on the assumption that ting can be further developed for future Nordsken events and we are documenting the project as we go.

You can check it out on ting.nordsken.se and if you want to pick up the starting item, go to ting.nordsken.se/start