Preparations for the 4th of July Festival have been taking up some of my free time of late. I’ve been working on making barriers, dealing with festival issues, and even getting a cool new banner to represent my club.I’ve got all the materials for my barriers, and have begun making them. I’m doing 5 at a time, to help ensure that each set is possibly a little better than the previous one, rather than having 25 barriers all with the same set of flaws. In fact, I made just one barrier from start to finish to make sure I had the process well understood before messing up the rest of my $400 in Coroplast. Good thing, too, as I found that for the zip ties I had, a slight modification to the instructions was needed. The design is the same, but the hinged areas needed to be one flute wider. Not a big deal, but things work much better with that change.
I completed my first 5 barriers last week. I couldn’t wait to set them up, so immediately carried them to the back yard and did so. They were even better than I expected them to be! They were much larger than they appeared to be in the photos on the TagParty site. Even a big guy like me can completely hide behind one of them. Put two or three of them in a row, and you’ve got a great little base to defend. I only had five, so set up one base with three barriers, and another with two. I set height extenders on some of them to give that extra bit of cover, and my back yard was never funner for laser tagging! The boys really liked them, as it was even easier for them to hide behind them. No more upturned patio tables or cardboard boxes that just get all soggy when it rains. Alex even invited friends over to play, and they all loved the barriers. With a full set of 25 barriers, I’ll be able to set up larger bases and still have a bunch of them for random cover in the field of battle. 🙂 I’m really looking forward to trying a zone game where the zone is completely surrounded by barriers with only a few openings for players to get in and out or shoot through.
I’ve been working on my next pack of 5 barriers this week, but it’s been slow going with all the testing for work, and other interruptions. Hopefully I can finish this 5 by the end of the week, and do some more play testing. hehe! 🙂
I was also contacted by the City of Auburn to find out if I had insurance for my event. Well, no, I don’t. I’m just a guy who loves to play tag, and gets people together at the park to do it. Fortunately, this only meant that instead of only letting people with the rides bracelet access the laser tag games, we would have to let anyone play (which I much prefer, since I wasn’t being paid to run the games), and that there would need to be a park staff member at the event the whole time, and that me and my helpers would be there as volunteers. That’s fine by me! More help is welcome, and letting more kids (and adults) play is a good thing. A parent might not purchase a ride bracelet for themselves, but they might very well join their kid(s) in some laser tag if they can do so for free.
And finally, I got my banner. It has the ALTC logo at both ends, and Auburn Lazer Tag Club in nice big lettering in the middle. You can see it on my ALTC web page. It’s a full 10 feet long, so I’ll need to use some velcro to help keep it nice and straight when hanging on my 10’x10′ canopy, but I think it will look great.
And I’ve still got 15 more barriers to make after this 5, new racks for the single type of tagger we’ll be using at the event, some instructional signs to design and get printed, and all that while people whine at me from my job, and a DVD project for CybCon (also in July) goes unfinished… my mouth is full, but I can’t spit anything out!