I’m a guy who specializes in designing horror-based escape rooms. It’s the basis behind why I now how to create an escape room. But before that, I came from a background of developing video games. You might not see a correlation between the two at first, but the more you think about it, the more you realize that some genres in video games are basically “escape rooms,” only experienced through a different medium. And thus I put my video game knowledge into my work in setting up escape rooms. Here’s how.
How It’s Done
What are Escape Rooms? Well if you’ve never been to one, they’re basically a closed space that houses a set of puzzles and challenges and sometimes frightening elements if it’s horror-based. These set of challenges are meant to be taken on by the participants in a story-driven experience to, you guessed it, escape the room.
But when we go about designing these experiences, like any interactive experience, we like to scan the demographic we’re targeting first. The games you’re going to build depend on the preferences and the traits of your audience. That includes the level of income, gender, interests, age and the game’s they’re into. You make the game around their personal traits, and you basically have a success. In our case, we’ve got a young audience, male and female equally with a great interest in horror.
After that, we planned on going through a load of escape rooms to put ourselves in the shoes of the players. To understand their possible train of thought and expectations to adjust the level of difficulty of the challenges accurately. The bunch that we’ve tried was a mixed bag. Some were good but others weren’t, and I had to guess why I would say that the game makers don’t have a basic understanding of the fundamental gameplay mechanics that a game designer would have in the back of his head. But let’s break down exactly what they could’ve done wrong.
How Can a Game Be Bad?
- Bland puzzles and challenges
- Unengaged game designers
- The challenge doesn’t get harder
- Puzzles do not relate to the general experience
- The absence of a tutorial
- Vague objectives
- Unpolished game features
- The story isn’t exciting
How Does an Escape Game Work?
In a nutshell, an escape game is a number of puzzles and challenges leading to a bunch of unlockables (like codes and boxes)
Except for the first puzzle, which will just be hidden somewhere around you for you just to find and use as you progress, the content of the majority of the puzzles is only accessible through solving the challenges in a specific order.
If a large group of players is playing the game together, you’d want your challenges to branch out to different parallel puzzles so that everyone can find something to do and not just stand around bored to death. And what’s equally important to have engaging and exciting puzzles is making them gradually getting harder, challenging and more complicated as the game goes on so that the players feel rewarded with the first easy puzzles and more excited by the later ones.
Easy Challenges
They’re basically the kind of puzzles that can be figured out without relying on previous answers and they’re pretty easy to spot and identify. They can be any kind of game relating to numbers and/or letters like Sudoku or crosswords.
So as we’ve mentioned before, your first puzzle should fall into this category of simple puzzles. So you take a simple riddle (horror based preferably), and you let the contestants have their fun. Now if you want you can make the answer to this riddle the code to opening some type of lock shutting a box containing the hint to the next challenge. You don’t want to make things too obvious, so keep the design of the items a bit subtle and not noticeable, but still with a horror theme to them.
Hard Puzzles
These will take more physical and especially mental effort. You’ll have to use information from different previous clues. It can be a code decrypted using a particular key that’s been hidden throughout the game.
For instance, you might find some sort of a recording that documents a murder that happened in the room you’re in. The clues you’d be looking for are differences between the room in the recording and the actual state of the room you’re in. These will typically lead you to a set of numbers or letters that can act as either the puzzle itself or the key to decrypting it.
Their role can even go beyond that. They can also be clues for future puzzles or simply contain information that would more explain the story you’re trying to uncover.
This kind of complex challenges can get as hard as you can imagine them to be. Just keep in mind that a frustrated player can try to solve them in some unusual ways. So be prepared for everything
Chests
So, these locks that you’re going to have should be kept safe in some kind of chest. A crate can be any type of container, just make sure to keep it subtle and blended into the environment.
For example, for a military-inspired game, you’d want to use a safe maybe. If it’s about pirates, you’d want to go with a treasure chest. You want to maintain as much immersion as possible.
Some players might try to break them which will ruin the natural progression of the experience. Make sure to have a clear set of rules for winning and losing in relation to this stuff and, always, a spare chest.
Locks
These are the things that the player wants to unlock using the solution of the puzzles you face. When using typical locks, try to make them as distinct as possible (unlocked through numbers, letters, symbols, etc) but only using one type for each room.
Another upside of having different types of locks is that the type of the lock can aid the player in figuring out what kind of information they should look for in the room (symbols, numbers, etc.). And that can also help you in having more creativity in the ideas you come up with when making clues.
But they don’t have to be only typical locks. You can have digitally locked electronics like computers with passwords or maybe a set of switches that need to be turned on in a precise sequence.
But always remember, have an abundance of locks. You cannot anticipate the lengths some players will go to to get answers.
Tech-based Puzzles
Integrating tech into your puzzles can sometimes be more appealing than traditional locks. Many shops sell tech related to escape games or some parts that can help you in doing your own puzzle. But make sure that tech has a place in your theme of choice before going with it.
VR?
Yeah, at least as of the moment of this article being written, VR is what’s hot on the market. Everyone uses it from big theme parks to smaller entertainment businesses. It breaks the barriers of the real world to allow creating your puzzle in a dimension where only your imagination is the limit.
Make sure that you have a staff that’s qualified to maintain a VR experience since most VR equipment goes beyond just headset. It can include controllers and sensors besides the powerful computer that’s doing all the work.
HTC and Oculus allow for the use of their tech in commercial environments, but other brands may not so be careful.
Designing the Game
How to create an escape room?
Like in making any video game, building an escape room requires a budget. You can’t precisely determine its limits before deciding the story that you want to tell and its grandeur.
You’ll feel like you’re trying to figure out multiple things at once. But you’ll need to do some basic work and designing to know precisely where you’re going to land with your budget.
Of course, period pieces are going to cost more, as you’ll have to design a very particular and unusual environment. Modern day stories will be cheaper. So that’s something to keep in mind.
Creating the Story
The story is where I start building the experience. It’s what everything else is built around: The environment, the characters, the puzzles. If it fails, the experience does too, just like in a video game.
Now to make things more exciting, you need to integrate a time limit that would decide the end of the story, depending on the player’s actions. You could be trapped in a death trap, and if you don’t escape in time, well, you die.
Let’s say you’re hostage on a pirate. The Captain promises to come back and paint the sails with your blood after pillaging your village. You have to get out of there.
So to design this, you start imagining props relating to pirates. When listing the items. I like to separate the boxy items from the non-boxy objects. Here’s an example:
Boxy Things:
- Parrot
- Treasure Chest
- Hourglass
- Pegleg
- …
Non-Boxy Things:
- Spyglass
- Shanties/slang
- Eyepatch
- Hook
- …
Remember that the goal isn’t about creating a specific puzzle, but doing a puzzle that flows through the story cohesively.
You might find that including things like a parrot in the boxy things category a bit weird. But we’re stretching the idea to include different closed bodies. So here’s what we can do:
- Give the parrot food for a reward
- Completing a slang phrase to open a closed container
- Using the spyglass to observe hidden clues
- Find a clue within the sand of the hourglass
- The peg leg can house riddle or a treasure map
Now you have to think realistically about your options. You’ll most likely be unable to get a proper parrot puppet to do the job and seem like a real parrot, but something like the peg leg is easy to accomplish. Just make sure everything looks as real as possible.
So put the feasible ideas into effect and also think of filling the room with story elements like a photograph or a letter.
Also, think about how you can put characters into use. So the bad guy is the captain, and he’s gone. Maybe there are some foolish members of the crew around you. If the player can trick them or bribe them, they can give clues as to what to do next. That means that you’ll need to have actors for interactions.
Want to create an escape room video?
Go for it! It’s important to look into what kind of tech you can use. Wave and storm sound emulators, hidden door mechanisms, and maybe AR generated ghosts. Why not?
Creating Levels and Story Progression
Like in video games, an escape game should have two things: Giving the player more accessibility and liberties as the game progresses and also making the challenges more and more complicated as the experience approaches its end. You won’t know how much freedom you’d want to give the player, or how hard or easy your puzzles are without playtesting.
Puzzles that I thought would be easy took some testers up to half an hour to figure out. So I could either scrap that puzzle or move it ahead if it fits somewhere. A good 1-hour experience should have about two-dozen mysteries, starting quite easy, getting a bit challenging and then ending with one insane enigma. Again, if you’re hosting a large group of players, try to make a non-linear set up for the puzzles so many players can be engaged simultaneously.
Put It on Paper
Lay out the entire map of your room on paper. And go through it as if you were playing a board game. This will help you refine the design and will give you a better understanding of the space available and how many players you can host at a time. You don’t want to overcrowd it.
Beginning/Ending Videos
Videos used to introduce and close the game can be fun. They can even be used throughout the game to give tips. Just keep in consideration the equipment and the editing needed to get it right.
Sound
The sound is not only essential to carry a story, but it’s crucial for Horror experiences. You’ll want to use it to bring attention to relevant parts of the story as well as scaring the life out of the players.
Points
If you plan on having rewards or leaderboards, think of a scoring system. It can take into consideration the time it took to finish or the number of hints that were used. It’ll give players a reason to act efficiently throughout the game.
Leaderboards
You might want to keep track of the performance of your players. You can simply post them online or even make your own app for people to use and share their experience. You can even reward players who bring their A game and do an outstanding job at finishing the game.
Guest Comfort
The guest’s comfort and entertainment are everything. Make sure they’re having fun before and after the game just as much as during it. Give them something to waste time with as they wait before playing like a TV or a photo Booth (great for sharing on social media). As for after the game, a group photo of their frightened faces as well as opening the room for questions as your staffs resets everything for the next round is a good idea.
Terms and Conditions
Make sure your guests are fully aware of everything that they will be exposed to during their game. So that way you’re both seeing eye to eye on everything.
Documents
Game Design
This is a collection of all the materials and papers that you have made and collected during your planning for the game. It will include everything any staff member would need to know about constructing the room. It’ll make things much more manageable.
The Game Manager
This job is required because it allows somebody to overview the players’ behavior inside the game and give hints and clues based on the document that you should construct for it.
Build, Scope and Budget
Scope
Here, you’ll have to do some math and assess the costs associated with building the escape room.
- Permits
- Actor payments
- The software’s to be used
- Marketing
- Staff
- Tech support
- Construction
Budget
After planning everything out, the budget you would need should be entirely clear for you.
Build
The most important thing about building after having everything locked down is making the room the safest it can be. The comfort of the guest always comes first. Make sure you have trained emergency personnel present at all times.
That’s It
So that’s basically how an escape room needs to be methodically designed following the principals of video game design.
Escape room video game design doesn’t have to be difficult
Before we leave you, here are some final pieces of advice.
- Having multiple copies of breakable items
- Numerous batteries for electronics
- Provide writing equipment to players to solve puzzles
- You will need the room to be fully visible through cameras to monitor every movement of the players
References:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_room
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_the_room