escape room trip

 Ethan peck - escape room trip - 7/11/23

As part of our research we visited the client at great yarmouth escape rooms, we split into two groups, here we looked at the behind the scenes running of the escape room as one group played one of the rooms and then we swapped and the played the other room that they had. the purpose of the trip was to learn as much we could about the design philosophy that goes into escape rooms so that we could translate these ideas when we made our games on unreal.

our group started off with the behind the scenes tour whilst the other group played the horror escape room, the goings on behind the scenes was extremely interesting as its something that you never see when playing the game and its important to see from a games designers perspective, the main things to note was the operators ability to input unique tips and hints for the players and the operators ability to interact with the players in many ways such as activating environmental effects to possibly scare players or playing audio effects, this adds a dynamism to the escape room that makes every experience unique for the players and makes the overall experience more fun as there is less predictability about the experience. by watching the behind the scenes work we were able to understand more about the principles of designing an escape room so we could translate this into out own escape rooms. 

it was then our groups turn to partake in the escape room, we did the wizard escape room. playing the escape rooms themselves is also extremely important as you can understand how these games should be played, how the mechanics play and how they work, you also get to experience the escape room from the players perspective this almost mimics the play testing that goes on when developing actual games, this allowed us to learn and gather ideas for our own projects.

great yarmouth escape rooms had two escape rooms available and the two groups played one each. both escape rooms had a unique theme, a unique storyline and unique mechanics that made them very good to learn from as we would need to start developing a unique escape room adjacent game of our own when we were done on the trip. some of the notable mechanics that were present in both escape rooms was tons of interaction with the environment, for the wizard escape room this came in the form of locating objects as the primary mechanic, and for the horror escape room it was far more complex and reliant on gathering and piecing together information, I was able to learn and gather ideas from both escape rooms, I was focused on gathering art ideas from both of the escape rooms, luckily the escape room game I am helping to make is horror themed so some of the ideas I gathered have been relevant. 

overall the escape room trip was a great learning experience as we got to see the inner workings of these games and how they are operated, this allowed us to gather ideas for our own projects and gave us an opportunity to speak with the client and get an understanding for what they were looking for in the project and what things we should be thinking about and including to make a fun experience for our players.