Prior to Escape Academy, Coin Crew Games produced location-based entertainment (LBE) experiences such as escape rooms and arcades. Producing an escape room called Space Squad in Space is how Wyatt Bushnell and Mike Salyh met, setting them on the path to founding Coin Crew Games.
The studio’s initial goal was to design casual arcade experiences for large groups of friends to have friendly competition. These early arcades came in the form of the licensed Hot Wheels: King of the Road racing machine and Coin Crew Game’s first original title, Battle Bowling.
Battle Bowling pits up to four people against each other who must frantically spin a large orb to navigate a dangerous lane and knock down the most pins. It will upset your mind.
During the development of our third cabinet, the pandemic struck, forcing the closure of physical entertainment spaces. We figured out how to translate our talent and experience into a digital title. This exploration led us to the idea of bringing the escape room experience to the digital space.
And that’s how Escape Academy was born!
The difference between physical and digital and making the transition
Unlike most digital titles, physical experiences last anywhere from three to sixty minutes, so a key part is making sure the game is immediately understandable without a tutorial. Players should understand the objective just by looking at the cabinet. Practicing simplicity has been a key part of making Escape Academy accessible.
In the case of Hot Wheels: King of the Road, the goal is simple. Overtake your friends and be the first to cross the finish line.
When it comes to puzzle design, a critical part is creating clues and ways for players to deduce the solution. In real escape rooms, All is a potential clue at first sight, so players spend much of the experience inspecting objects to determine their relevance to the puzzles. To recreate this digitally, each object in the environment must be programmed as an interactive element, which posed a challenge in terms of scope.
This technical limitation made us decide to be very selective on the elements of the environment that became interactive, which allowed us to better control the path of the player in the room. It was a critical way that balanced our rooms and ensured that all the puzzles remained approachable instead of overwhelming. Naturally, this “balancing” process requires some trial and error. However, Coin Crew Games had already put in place a regiment of rigorous game testing for their physical experiences, which was another critical part of the process that needed digital translation.
In the past, we watched people play and noticed how they moved through space, their body posture, and how many quarters they put into the machine. The move to digital turned into running 2-6 playtests per week while players’ screen shared their gameplay view and team members observed gameplay patterns. We encouraged our testers to discuss their thought processes while solving puzzles to focus on misleading clues.
Art and environment
Operating in the digital space allows immense latitude in designing the environment, as the laws of physics, space constraints, or pesky security waivers no longer hold us back. However, we had to establish some pillars around our environment design to serve the gameplay and keep things focused.
The most important principle we established was that the setting of each room allow for varied but thematically consistent puzzles. Placing a computerized binary cipher in the cafeteria wouldn’t feel thematically correct, and placing an entire escape room level in the janitor’s closet wouldn’t allow for a deep pool of diverse puzzles.
In the photo above, the “Escape Artist” level, which was themed around the art class, unlocked the ability to delve into spatial reasoning and other visual puzzles.
Another element of escape room design in which digital environments allowed for some flexibility was the “ticking of the clocks” of the rooms, i.e. the in-universe reason for it to there is a time limit. Things like the flood tower or the burning library are time clocks that are only possible in video game media. After confirming that a room’s theme could adequately provide the puzzle design space, the storytelling and puzzle teams worked together to establish exciting stakes that could be represented in level through art, the sound and the story.
Iteration and extension
The ability to update, iterate on, and respond to feedback within the product itself is another huge advantage that digital titles provide, and we’ve done our best to take advantage of a myriad of different ways. In the case of our upcoming DLC, Escape from the Past, we’re telling a prequel story centered around an Academy thriller that gives the player agency over the mystery itself.
Without giving players a chance to solve the case in level, we feared that the “polar” would be unsatisfactory. This challenge forced us to push our escape room mechanics to their limits.
We explored ways to give our players agency in the mystery and entangle the narrative more closely with the puzzles to lean into the premise. This resulted in the concealment of associated clues at all levels, allowing players to identify the culprit. We’ve also developed a new mechanic that features a branching sequence in the final level that takes players down a different puzzle path depending on which faculty member they blame as the culprit.
We’re not going anywhere
After the release of our first digital title, the team at Coin Crew Games were thrilled to be greeted with such a warm welcome to the indie development scene. Interactions with players, developers and the PlayStation Indies team have been exceptional, and we look forward to continuing to work with everyone to create exciting digital experiences that leverage our physical experience.
Don’t forget to keep your eyes peeled for Escape Academy: Escape from the Past, out June 19, and future Escape Academy updates.
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