Losing Money to Become a Tycoon: Starting with Games
Chapter 376: The Preliminary Plan for the Haunted House
January 5th, Wednesday.
Chen Kangtuo and Hao Qiong were sitting in the coffee area of Moyu Internet Café, each holding a laptop and typing away rapidly.
Both of them looked like they were overflowing with ideas. Their fingers barely stopped moving, only pausing occasionally to organize their thoughts and take a sip of coffee from the table.
They were working on a plan for a haunted house.
During their time in the United States, the group's experiences felt like a dream—except it was a nightmare.
Fog Hill State Psychiatric Hospital, the former site of an abandoned hospital, is also known as the scariest haunted house in the world.
Over the course of five days, the small tour group experienced this haunted house "in small doses but many times," going through it thoroughly. The hardships they endured were beyond words.
The impressions were too deep, the realizations too many. Even in the past few days, when they dreamed at night, they often found themselves "gaining new insights" or "reliving memories that had already become blurred."
So after returning to Jingzhou, Chen Kangtuo and Hao Qiong were bursting with inspiration and couldn't wait to write down their visiting experiences and apply them to the haunted house project they were responsible for.
But they weren't copying it outright, they were critically absorbing what they learned.
They had written all day yesterday and all morning today. With such an efficient working rhythm, the basic plan was already mostly complete.
"Come on, let's compare our drafts," Chen Kangtuo suggested.
They sent the documents they had written on their laptops to each other.
Since returning, the two of them hadn't communicated much, mainly to avoid their ideas influencing each other.
Each of them produced a separate plan. Only after thorough discussion and then combining the two would they achieve the best result.
Of course, both of their plans shared a common foundation: the overall direction for the haunted house construction that President Pei had proposed before.
President Pei's opinions were the most core standards and could not be violated.
"Make it so that the brave have nowhere to spend their money, and the timid don't dare to come," was President Pei's original line.
After going through their usual "standard process" of reading comprehension, Chen Kangtuo and Hao Qiong roughly summarized two key points:
Set up three projects, with the level of horror increasing step by step;
Use discounts and refunds so that brave people pay less, and timid people pay more.
In this way, they could ensure both the haunted house's reputation and its profitability, while also taking into account different types of customers.
However, they still didn't have very good ideas about what the specific projects should be.
That was why they needed to gather material from some successful haunted houses.
Now, they had the material. They had the scares. The key now was the concrete plan.
They finished reading each other's proposals.
Chen Kangtuo was a little surprised. "It seems we're on the same page in many aspects. Maybe it's because we've both worked in the game industry, so we're used to solving problems with a game-designer's mindset?"
Hao Qiong nodded. "Yeah, probably."
Their two plans had several points that naturally converged.
For the first project, the level of horror would be relatively low, suitable for multiplayer social play.
Chen Kangtuo's idea was to make it a more classic horror escape room, while Hao Qiong wanted to adapt the gameplay of BE QUIET into a live-action, real-life version of BE QUIET.
Of course, neither of them had a very concrete idea yet, it's just a rough direction.
The second project would have a moderate level of horror and serve as a transition to the third project. It would basically be single-player.
This project could be set in a very small space, but the horror effect would definitely not be weak. Only those who passed this project would qualify to challenge the third one.
On this point, the two of them fully agreed: using narrow spaces of just a few to a dozen square meters for single-person experiences.
However, Hao Qiong proposed an additional idea: they could use shipping containers as the basic units. The insides of the containers would be decorated as different scenes, with pulleys installed underneath. This way, several different projects could be rearranged at any time, ensuring that players would never know which project they were about to experience.
The third project would have the highest level of horror and aim to recreate the group's experiences at the Fog Hill State Psychiatric Hospital.
But the plans the two of them came up with were not quite the same as the routine used by the Fog Hill State Psychiatric Hospital.
At present, most haunted houses don't manage their pacing very well.
Some smaller domestic haunted houses basically have just one route from start to finish. There are no extra exits along the way, so even if you want to leave midway, you can only grit your teeth and keep going.
Fortunately, in these simpler haunted houses there's usually no staff interaction and the scares aren't that intense, so almost everyone can make it through the whole route.
Larger haunted houses have longer routes and much higher scare levels, so they need to reserve plenty of emergency exits. Once visitors can't hold on anymore, they can leave at any time through these exits.
Of course, they also need to install enough surveillance cameras to monitor visitors' conditions in real time.
For a super-large haunted house like the Fog Hill State Psychiatric Hospital, even more emergency exits are required, along with staff on standby to escort visitors out if they can't endure it.
But after visiting this haunted house, both of them came to the same conclusion: ordinary people simply can't last in this kind of haunted house, it's such a waste!
In fact, on the first day of their visit, the challenge didn't go smoothly.
Bao Xu and Hao Qiong lasted less than ten minutes before retreating. The ones who held out the longest were Lin Wan and Li Yada, who stayed inside for over twenty minutes.
Of course, Li Yada only managed to last that long because Lin Wan forcibly dragged her along. Otherwise, she probably would have backed out the moment she stepped inside.
From their observations, this reaction wasn't an isolated case.
After buying tickets, most visitors were already badly frightened just by watching the atmosphere-setting short film in the waiting area, and they couldn't hold on for long after entering.
Chen Kangtuo and Hao Qiong both felt that this was a pity.
So much effort went into creating such a terrifying haunted house, yet more than half the visitors were scared off before they even really got started, it was such a waste.
As the saying goes, you should fatten the pig before slaughtering it.
Just like with games: if you make a punishing game, it's normal for some people to be driven away at the first level. But if more than half the players quit at the first level, then the difficulty tuning is clearly a problem.
The difficulty should ramp up gradually. Even if players are meant to suffer, there needs to be proper pacing, you can't really beat them into quitting.
If their own haunted house mindlessly copied the Fog Hill State Psychiatric Hospital's approach, there would be only one outcome: no one would come.
That's because the Fog Hill State Psychiatric Hospital, as the world's scariest haunted house, has already built up its reputation, so it can guarantee visitor traffic.
But their own haunted house would be built in the suburbs of Jingzhou. It had no fame to speak of and obviously couldn't attract visitors from all over the world right away. If the entry barrier was too high, they definitely wouldn't be able to recoup their costs.
So every single visitor would be important.
Chen Kangtuo and Hao Qiong each came up with some solutions.
Hao Qiong's proposal was to sell tickets that allow multiple entries, while deliberately lowering the level of horror in the early stages.
In the early parts of the experience, they would arrange some segments that were fun but not as scary, first finding ways to keep visitors engaged.
At the same time, each ticket would allow multiple entries, and the ticket price could be set a bit higher. This would effectively give visitors some buffer time, allowing them to calm down before going in again to challenge themselves.
This was exactly how Hao Qiong and the others did it in the United States. In fact, the first time was so terrifying that they barely remembered what they experienced at all—they were completely overwhelmed.
But when they went in again afterward, once they had some psychological expectations, the haunted house actually became interesting.
However, ordinary visitors wouldn't queue up again and pay for another ticket just to suffer a second time, so they naturally wouldn't get to experience this kind of "second-run" feeling.
Therefore, Hao Qiong believed the tickets should be designed to allow multiple entries from the start.
This way, even if some visitors are temporarily scared off, since their ticket still allows re-entry, they can come back for a second try after some time, once they've calmed down.
That way, the haunted house can gain a group of returning customers.
Chen Kangtuo's proposal, on the other hand, was to design the haunted house as a circular route, with a safe room in the very center.
After clearing each small stage, players could enter the safe room to rest and adjust their emotions.
Like the Fog Hill State Psychiatric Hospital, where you spend more than an hour in the haunted house in one go—most people simply can't endure that. This means that most people are unable to experience the entire haunted house from start to finish.
That can be seen as a serious waste of resources.
So Chen Kangtuo felt that they could borrow some approaches from games to solve this problem.
Many horror games have mechanics like "save points" or "safe rooms," precisely to give players whose nerves are constantly stretched to the limit a chance to rest and ease their tension before continuing onward.
Therefore, Chen Kangtuo thought they could incorporate a safe-room mechanic into the haunted house, allowing players to continuously adjust their mindset during the experience instead of being easily scared off.
Although the two plans were different, they didn't conflict at all and could coexist perfectly well.
After reading Chen Kangtuo's proposal, Hao Qiong looked slightly worried. "If we arrange it like this, won't our haunted house be cleared too easily? If visitors can finish it in one go, they probably won't come a second time, right?"
Chen Kangtuo shook his head. "I don't think the ultimate purpose of a haunted house is to scare visitors so badly that they can't finish it. If visitors are scared off at the very first stage, then no matter how good or how terrifying the later parts are, what's the point?"
"Letting visitors complete the whole experience naturally gives us plenty of opportunities to scare them."
"In fact, whether or not visitors finish the entire haunted house, they're very unlikely to enter the same haunted house again anyway."
"If most visitors are scared off right at the beginning, their evaluation of the haunted house definitely won't be very high, which is bad for building word of mouth. When new visitors see reviews saying that this haunted house scares people away right at the start, they'll probably be discouraged too."
"Since that's the case, it's better to find ways to let visitors play for longer, ramp things up gradually, and leave them with some deep impressions and lingering memories. That's more conducive to building our reputation and attracting new visitors."
Hao Qiong thought about it and nodded. "Yeah, that makes sense."
"Then what should we do next? Report our progress to President Pei first, or flesh out the detailed plans for each project first?"
Chen Kangtuo said, "There's no way we can produce full detailed plans for everything all at once. The first and third projects are both relatively hard to design, they take up a lot of space and involve complex gameplay, so we need to plan them carefully over time."
"For these two big projects, we can roughly reserve the space first, recruit people, and develop them gradually."
"The second project is made up of many small sub-projects, so it's relatively simpler and easier to implement. Let's roughly finalize the second project first, then show the whole plan to President Pei."
"Once President Pei gives the nod, we can start construction. While building the second project, we can slowly think through the first and third projects at the same time."
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