How to Build an Escape Room
The secrets of designing and building escape rooms from a Software Engineer’s perspective
I am a software engineer at Kainos Software Ltd, and in early 2020, I embarked on an unusual, yet exciting project, which would later be known as Kainos Lockdown. My mission, should I choose to accept it:
Create, build, and run a portable escape room which is immersive and fun, yet educational, in just 6 weeks!
An escape room is a real-life adventure game where teams solve puzzles in a themed room to complete an objective, in a race against the clock!¹ The number of escape rooms has been increasing in popularity, seeing nearly 1,500 in the UK last year².
Kainos are not usually in the business of building escape rooms. Normally the Applied Innovation team focuses on digital technology solutions like virtual and augmented reality, and wielding the lightsaber of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Education around these topics are part of our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and so the idea for an educational escape room was born. An escape room with an educational twist baked into it; introducing complex topics like machine learning, cyber security, and other digital technologies. Our escape room was also unique in that is was portable; able to be setup in a number of different locations.
In my journey to discovering the craft of escape room building — I uncovered three main design considerations which make up the experience. Let’s unpack them below, so that you too can become a master builder of escape rooms!
PUZZLES
Try out this Kainos Lockdown puzzle below and be sure to check your answer at the end of the blog!
A planet has stars, and a cluster make thee,
Each star has one planet, the closest it must be.
Coloured numbers you seek, how many? Who knows?
Only God up above with his marbles he shows.
Above we have item one on the escape room shopping list: PUZZLES. Arguably, these make up the most fundamental part of an escape room, whereby solving and deciphering codes and riddles are your only hope of escaping!
Make sure to check your answer to the above riddle at the end of this article!
NARRATIVE
Hurrying into an artificially lit office, you find a cluttered server room, windows shut and blacked out, a wall of computer screens and computer information scribbled across a whiteboard. Posters of Marvel movies and Game of Thrones characters cover the walls like Roy and Moss’ office space in the I.T. Crowd. Server units, boxes, filing cabinets, and other server room equipment around the room continue to intensify the mission that you have been tasked with, just minutes before you left the safety of the escape room instructors!
Distinguished readers, item two on the escape room drawing board: NARRATIVE. What’s in the boooox? What are your victims told about the room and what they must achieve once entered? How should the room be decorated and themed to immerse it’s participants into the story as if there were living it?
COMMUNICATIONS
Item thrice, which harmonically completes the set, and confirms the illuminati, are the COMMUNICATIONS, an element many do not think of. This relates to considerations for how the escape room overlord can monitor the participants and their interactions with the room. This also must include a system whereby the coordinator can communicate with the room to enforce the laws of the land, ensuring that things are not broken, and that struggling teams get enough hints that ensure they do not starve to death!
I have described above the three godheads of the escape room trinity, as I uncovered in my completion of this project. Now it is time for me to take you down this design path. A path which exposes some of the technologies used to facilitate parts of our experience, some stolen agile practices from our more conventional software projects, and how it all fitted into a 6 week build plan!
Step 1: Research
Where Do You Start?
As a software engineer, I learned to be a Jedi master of Google before I was ready to wield any code editor! Unfortunately, I found in this particular situation I wasn’t able to find the ‘6-week escape room starter pack’ type of information I was hoping for. I needed questions answered like, how do I monitor the room, or how do I make sure the team don’t get stuck, or how should the puzzles link together.
The answer to the latter of those two questions I learned from the escape room we took part in as a team. Escape rooms come in two types (in relation to the progress of puzzle solving): linear, and non-linear.
One Path, Or Many Paths?
In a linear game, each puzzle needs solved before you can progress to the next one. On the other hand, a non-linear escape room has many unrelated puzzles that can be solved in parallel.
In my limited knowledge of escape rooms, I prefer non-linear games for the following reasons:
- Players enjoy doing these games for the satisfaction of solving puzzles. In a non-linear game there is more opportunity for puzzles to be solved quicker across a larger team, giving the illusion of quicker progress, feeding into better user satisfaction and enjoyment.
- In that respect, linear games tend to lack immersion, where one puzzle becomes the bottleneck for the team’s progress and adds frustration, taking away from the ability for a team to explore their room sized world.
- Non-linear puzzles tend to have at least some linear elements to them, whether that be at the beginning, or the end. The latter being the more common, whereby the non-linear parts all converge into the final steps which complete the teams objectives.
- Because non-linear games can have multiple tasks solved in parallel, they are more suited to larger teams. This gives rise to the added complexity of a large team where communication and coordination becomes more and more important.
Pick a Genre
Ok, so at this point I decided I was going to build a non-linear game. But what would it be about? What was going to be the theme? Well, first take inspiration from what has gone before. Some escape rooms have general themes like, sci-fi, modern, victorian etc. Some can have very specific themes like a TV show, or a movie, or a historic event. What you end up going for is down to personal preference and what you believe people will be interested in!
Time is Money
But how long was it going to take me? I asked this question with my software engineering hat on, treating this project like any other agile software project. I worked out how long each step may take and built it into a beautiful Gantt Chart.
In retrospect, this was an extremely useful step to have worked out because it meant that I could monitor the progress of the project as it developed. So now that I know my timescale, let’s layout the puzzles!
Step 2: Gameplay Design
Coming up with the puzzles and linking them together was one of the most enjoyable parts of the project. If you have no idea where to start, and you can’t get any ideas online (have a look here), try visiting an escape room for yourself to get some ideas!
When planning each puzzle I sometimes found it easier to work backwards…
- What is the clue or item they need? (key / a riddle)
- How/where do I lock it away from them? (locked box)
- What do they need to find/unlock it? (key / 4-digit code)
- What clues will they need to find/unlock it? (hints / instructions)
Each puzzle normally works as a standalone puzzle, so when you have a number of them, you simply chain them together by having the prize for solving the first puzzle make up part/all of the clue to the second puzzle.
Finally, document it!
Documentation is super important in many different projects. Not only does it allow someone else to come along and make sense of those “crazy” thoughts, but it also means that they understand the system in a way that future people on the project can maintain, and upgrade the system.
Of course it wouldn’t be fair if I told you all the puzzles and sections within my design. However, I have laid out a copy of the final flowchart with the text removed above, to give you an idea of what this escape room treasure map may look like.
Step 3: Narrative Writing
The difference between a room full of puzzles, and an immersive escape room experience, is the story which participants are made part of. Some might say that the best escape room experiences can be compared to Alice in Wonderland. Like Alice, your participants enter a whole new place, with a different look, new characters, and new rules. And like a fairytale, your escape room story must also grip the imagination of your participants, so that they feel as part of the story, as you do being the author of it.
Arguably this step might be done before step 2, or possibly alongside it, so that the structure of the gameplay makes sense in the context of the story. There is no sense writing a story better than Twilight, only for it to feel detached from the actions of the room because the puzzles have little or no correlation with the story itself.
Keep in mind the story also has a function. This story’s main objective is to set the scene, and introduce the objective to the gamers. See our example below!
Step 4: Acquiring Equipment
All projects have a budget, and this one is no different. Therefore, consider which items actually need to be new and working. I found that a large amount of the items did not have to be new, or sometimes looked better worn or broken.
Of course, the cheaper items tended to be those that were not necessary to the progress of the game, but were merely adding to the look and authenticity of the room. In product-design/engineering terms we call these non-functional requirements.
However, a functional requirement is something that the game depends on — these tended to be more expensive. For example, we programmed part of the experience into an Oculus Quest, a virtual reality headset which goes for £400 currently.
I also needed certain triggers to activate when puzzles were completed. Of course, given enough time and resources, one would try to automate all of these so that the overlord on the CCTV cameras does as little as possible. A simpler option was just to use smart plugs!
On the topic of CCTV, how did I monitor the room? We need to be able to tell when a young Indiana Jones is about to break a box by forcing it open! Expensive CCTV setups tend to be expensive and rather permanent. I wanted my escape room design to be mobile, so that it would be able to work in nearly any environment.
Thankfully, the rise of the IoT device came to help! An IoT device (Internet of Things) is a device that communicates and functions via an internet connection. It is highly likely that you might have some of these devices already invading your home, such as an Alexa or Google home, or smart plugs and smart lights.
Our ‘communication desk’ was composed of the following:
- A smart camera, two radio cameras, and a GoPro for visuals in the room
- An Amazon Alexa Dot and a set of walkie talkies were used for audio
- A tablet with applications installed to control smart plugs and lights
Step 5: Building & Testing
Finally, it was only a matter of putting everything into a room and seeing what worked and what didn’t. There were a number of times I tried things out and they just didn’t work. Thankfully I had planned this into our schedule! ‘Failing Fast’ is a philosophy very much at play here, whereby figuring out when something wasn’t going to work and quickly recovering via an alternative method.
It took a number of test runs before we got a ‘comms desk’ working with reliable audio and visuals. After that the puzzles themselves needed some small adjustments to make them the correct level of difficultly. Sometimes we would realise a step is too hard on our own, by noticing the pattern of teams that all struggle at that same point. Other times it was the participants themselves that would argue certain tasks too challenging, were it not for the overlords hints.
Once you settle on a final version, all that’s left to do is…
Start the Clock!
Sit back, relax, and enjoy being your very own escape room overlord!
Answer to the Planet Clustering Riddle
This puzzle was created to introduce users to a machine learning algorithm known as K-Means Clustering.
The answer is solved by deciphering the riddle to get the instructions for performing the ‘Update Cluster Assignments’ step as demonstrated in the animation above.
A planet has stars, and a cluster make thee,
Each star has one planet, the closest it must be.
A cluster is simply a planet (diamond) surrounded by stars. The planet forms the cluster centre and the stars belong to this cluster only if they are closer to it, than to any other planet. The puzzle requires you to go through each star and assign it to the closest planet in order to form clusters.
Coloured numbers you seek, how many? Who knows?
Only God up above with his marbles he shows.
The solution to the puzzle is a series of coloured numbers. The colour directly relates to ‘God’s marbles’ (planets) which happen to be coloured. Having completed the clustering part of the riddle, you should have each coloured planet and its respective stars. The number of stars in each planet cluster is the number, and it’s colour is the colour of the planet…
[1]: (13 March 2020) Escape Rooms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_room
[2]: Simon Usbourne. (1st April 2019). Get me out of here! Why escape rooms have become a global craze https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/apr/01/get-out-how-escape-rooms-became-a-global-craze
