TeamGMMP Primer: Did You Win an Adventure Lab?

TeamGMMP won an Adventure Lab, and he was looking for ideas. Instead of letting his collect dust (like mine – I won one, too), he setup a series of events to motivate the other winners (AKA Adventure Lab Brainstorming Guild). 

Weird people show up to events

His Adventure Lab Hamtramck – Following Polish Footprints and Bonus Cache released last week! Greg was kind enough to share feedback to help the other Lab owners.

Here are a few notes, based on what I have experienced myself, creating my adventure lab and based on feedback I have received from other geocachers.

Feedback

1.      RTFM! Yes, do it first. It is well written and explains a lot of things. You have received it as a link in the email you got from Groundspeak.

2.      Set your theme – for example “Cemeteries in Warren”, “Famous people buried in this cemetery”, etc. To be a good sport, avoid existing stages of wherigos, multicaches and other. What is the point of duplicating it? Avoid single business chain theme, like “Best Dunkin’ Donuts in Metro Detroit”. You get the gist…

3.      Scout your locations, take lots of pictures of the objects – from far away, close-ups. You don’t want to visit the places more than once, just because you made a boo-boo of your picture. Prepare 6 or 7 locations, so you have something to discard, when working on your lab at home.

4.      Take ACCURATE coordinates of your locations. Use websites, like Latitude and Longitude of a Point to fine-tune them. Nothing takes the fun out of geocaching more than wrong coordinates.

5.      As your adventure lab coordinates (or starting point), you may use your first location, or somewhere close to a parking lot. The big fat red pin on the map points to this location, so it is easier for other geocachers to use Google navigation.

6.      In regards to code words to have the location accounted as “found”: take pictures of them (close-ups!), make sure you remember (or write them down), which code word is for which location (doh!), LOL. Also, as I have been enlightened by one of the geocachers (thanks, june17!) that they are not case sensitive.

7.      Use your adventure lab app to search for existing adventure labs. Yes, I know, you are far away from them, but at least you’ll see their introduction pages – this will help you quite a lot.

8.      Use as many characters as you can in your description. 1024 of them is not much, but it is better, than “It is just a brick church” description…

9.    Create a couple of locations first, place pictures, short descriptions, questions for code words and TEST your lab (there is a button for that). In test mode fencing is off, so WYSIWYG (Google it, LOL) from the comfort of your home.

10.   About fencing – I had reduced mine from 1000 meters to 100 meters. In Hamtramck cell coverage is good, so I had no issues. Avoid tightening it too much – to 5 meters or even 1 meter [:O]. This is just annoying and takes fun out of geocaching.

FAQ

A few of questions from other geocachers:

1.   QR Code – what’s up with that? It gets created, when you create your adventure lab and opt-in (I believe, this is an opt-in) to have a link for private mode. The link to my adventure lab is this https://labs.geocaching.com/goto/GMMPHamtramck and QR code is just that. After I have created my lab and before I set it to “private”, I scanned the QR code with my cell phone (from my laptop) and I had my adventure lab running on my phone.

2.    Did you use any videos in your adventure lab? No, I didn’t. I would have to create them, post them on YouTube with director’s commentary, etc. Sorry, I didn’t have time for that. Look for a theatre in downtown Ft. Wayne adventure lab, it has a video there.

3.    Did you write everything yourself, or copied from somewhere?. Both. If you copy, make sure you mention the source, to avoid legal trouble. I used Wikipedia and mentioned it on my pages.

4.     Why did you create a bonus cache? Why not? It is optional, you don’t have to do it. It is allowed and mine got published without any issues. To make it work, at each location CODE WORD CONFIRMATION page, mention a few digits for the bonus cache coordinates, or even better, letters. I have used one letter per location, so if you put them in order into Certitude geochecker (of the bonus cache), final coordinates will be revealed. The advantage of letters over having portions (digits) of coordinates in the adventure lab is that if you have to move your bonus cache, you don’t have to mess with your adventure lab – you just change the final waypoint of the cache and the Certitude checker solution.
Again - so you know - insert the bonus cache info in these fields only:
Journal message [Optional]
Enter a message to display when a player has completed this location.

5.      How many lab cache icons do I get in my “hidden” statistics? The number of locations – in my case – five.

6.      How many lab cache icons do I get, when I find somebody else’s adventure lab? Same – the number of locations found by you.

7.      Did you set your adventure lab to linear or non-linear? Non-linear. It means, you can play locations in ANY order. If you set it to LINEAR, you force other players to play the locations in order you listed them from top to bottom on the main page. By the way, if they get stuck on the first location and cannot continue, I am pretty sure that you’ll hear, what they have to say about your adventure lab… in very unchosen words…
The switch is on the main page, right above the list of your locations and it is called “Play locations in sequential order”.

Title Page Example

For your reference, here is the title page of my adventure lab, you may copy and paste it and edit to your needs. do mention the projected completion time, whether it is linear or non-linear, etc.

This is your opportunity to visit 5 locations in Hamtramck related to Polish history of this city. All locations have parking areas nearby, the whole adventure should not take you more than 2 hours of driving and walking.

At each location a question will have to be answered correctly to receive credit for the lab cache. A total of 5 credits will be given. In the end you will have "found" 5 lab caches.

The locations do not have to be visited in order.

Note for the code words: I will give you hints, what to look for to get credit for a given location. Typically, you'll be looking for a number of characters. They will be a mix of letters, digits, spaces and special characters. They can be all letters or all digits as well.

At each location description, a letter will be given for the bonus cache. Collect all 5 of them, then enter into the bonus cache's checker for its final coordinates.

I hope you enjoy this adventure lab!

TeamGMMP

And Finally….

Hereby, I would like to thank all geocachers for many good ideas and pointers I have received, while preparing my adventure lab. Especially, I would like to thank scrapcat, who last month, at the I won an Adventure Lab and I need help! event just threw it out in the open - "How about Hamtramck, G.? You could do that!" So I did [:)]. Big, very big thank you, scrapcat [:)].

I hope my scribbling below will help other geocachers to create their adventure labs.

If anybody has more questions, I will be happy to help, just send me a message or an email.

TeamGMMP