Jason Ah Chuen, Eunji Lee, Ben Liao, Ricky Grannis-Vu, David Guo
Some of our most fun nights have been solving escape rooms with friends. There’s something about that “a-ha!” moment when everything just clicks which always brings us back for more. But sometimes that “a-ha!” moment gets lost in the flashing lights, special effects, and over-the-top props. We want to find new ways to deliver that “a-ha!” moment to players and to give them reason to think “maybe just one more look”.
So we sat down and thought — how can we deliver this experience to players? We left no stone unturned in our search for the answer. But this problem seemed a bit of a puzzle! The clock was ticking and we still hadn’t figured out how to solve this challenge. Maybe, we thought, we wouldn’t make it in time. Then, one afternoon, we took a step back and suddenly we had our own “a-ha!” moment! We didn’t want any straightforward riddles or logic puzzles — we wanted players to search for the puzzles themselves! Just like we did when designing our escape room, players will need to think about how they can change their perspective. Solutions might require just taking a step back or looking at a commonplace object from a new angle. We had a lot of fun creating our escape room and we hope you have just as much fun playing it!
We intended for our escape room to convey Narrative and Fellowship types of fun. Because our escape room deals with slightly scary themes, our target audience is players of high school age and above. In particular, our escape room is best suited for players who enjoy deducing narratives and solving moderately difficult challenges.
To prepare for developing our escape room, we completed an escape room in San Jose together as a team, and noted that the most fun and memorable puzzles meshed well with the theme of the escape room, and vice versa — puzzles which didn’t mesh well with the theme broke the sense of immersion. One of our guest speakers, Laura Hall, echoed this sentiment. Thus, in designing our escape room, our primary focus was to connect the puzzles closely to the escape room’s theme. Over the course of development, we continually playtested, revised, and even removed puzzles which we felt did not tie well in to the theme and setting.
One key challenge we faced was designing our escape room’s props and puzzles so that we could set up our escape room and take it down quickly, in order to make time for the subsequent group to set up. To accomplish this, we mapped out in advance where each puzzle and prop would go, so that we could quickly follow our set-up guide when setting up our escape room. We also pre-built each puzzle and prop as much as possible so that we didn’t have to assemble small decorations when we got to Durand 410 — we could simply move our pre-built large pieces in and be mostly ready to go. For example, when setting up our chess puzzle, we glued the different pieces onto the board in advance so that we could simply move the puzzle into the designated space and not have to assemble lots of little pieces (this decision also ended up streamlining the puzzle’s completion, inadvertently leading to positive feedback from playtesters). Through careful mapping and pre-assembly, we were able to reduce our set-up time from two hours to just thirty minutes while keeping the same escape room quality.
When we completed an escape room in San Jose as a team in preparation for our own design process, we took notes on what worked well and what didn’t. We learned that setting the tone early on through a small bit of exposition prior to letting players into the escape room was very effective. We emulated this in our own escape room by writing the following short script to set the tone of our escape room. Prior to letting players into our escape room, we recited this memorized script to them:
There are rumors among the students in Professor Emmanuel’s introductory archaeology class. They say that the eccentric old man kidnaps students he doesn’t like and sacrifices them to a devil-worshipping cult.
You and your friends just want help on the problem set at office hours. You don’t believe any of the gossip. One day, you show up to his office hours, but no one’s there. The more you look around, the more … off … things seem.
We also struggled to open a couple of the locks when solving the escape room in San Jose — we didn’t realize that we had to press down on the top of the lock to unlock it and we also didn’t know how to reset one of the locks. Therefore, after reading the above script to the players, we demonstrated how to unlock and reset the locks to the players. This was very effective in our final playtest — none of the players had trouble unlocking or resetting the locks. Below is the video we gave our players to watch before entering the escape room.
Finally, we explained our hint system to the players. More information about our hint system is presented below.
We pre-created three hints for each puzzle in order to guide the players if they became stuck, and saved our hints in a shared spreadsheet for easy access. For each puzzle, each of the three hints progressively shared more information in order to solve the puzzle, with the third hint essentially detailing the solution to the players. We conducted our own playtest with our own sourced playtesters prior to the final playtest in order to ensure that our hints gave the appropriate level of help.
We aimed to keep our hint system consistent with the tone of our escape room. Since our escape room was set in an office hours setting, we created a custom Slack channel in order to communicate with players and adopted the personas of “helpful TAs”. Players were able to signal that they wanted hints using this Slack channel, and we also reached out to players to offer a hint if they became stuck on a puzzle for an extended period of time. During our onboarding process, we added players to this custom Slack channel. The hint system proceeded smoothly during our final playtest — players did not encounter any issues with it, and it allowed us to regulate our target completion time.