There is a finesse to taking a room and filling it with a maze. It’s one of the first tasks a haunter faces, often before ever setting foot inside the building, and sometimes the measurements one is given don’t include small details about the structure…like, say, the placement of supportive columns scattered throughout the space.
In 2001, my haunt boss Allan discovered that the floor plan he had worked so hard to complete now had a honkin’ huge metal column directly in the middle of the last room of the haunt.
I suggested we call it the Bloof Bell and keep a count of how many customers ran smack into it.
…This is representative of why I don’t design haunt mazes.
So Bones knew our haunt space included an awkwardly placed car lift, and has been sketching out varied plans for weeks, but really needed to get into the space to take a few measurements. Which we did, last night.
…Yeah, that might suck a little.
The “arms” of the lift, we found, fold inward, lessening the thing’s footprint. But Bones thought we could do one better by raising the lift and turning this huge space hog into just two columns.
“Um.”
“What?!? It’ll be fine!”
“Mmkay…”
Bad news: We have no idea how to lower it once it became obvious that it wasn’t going to raise high enough.
Good news: We figured out how to widen the space between the arms so that, if we can contain the scary sticky-outie bit, we can make thus into an actor cubby. Or, ya know, something.
Also good news: We found the ‘power off’ button so we can prevent anyone else from saying, “Hey, what does THAT button do?”
And then Bones ran around taking measurements and figuring out what other things we’ll need to build around…
(…we don’t get to keep the car..)
…I wandered around checking for any water leaks after the rain storms earlier that day (YAY NO WATER CURSE!!)…and we made plans to go fetch wall panels the next day.
Zoom!
squirrels in my head 