Before Escape Academy, Coin Crew Games produced location-based entertainment (LBE) experiences such as escape rooms and arcade cabinets. Producing an escape room called Space Squad in Space was the meeting of Wyatt Bushnell and Mike Sully, who paved the way for her founding Coin Crew Games.
The studio’s original goal was to design a casual arcade experience where large groups of friends could compete in friendly ways. These first arcade his cabinets took the form of the licensed racing his machines Hot Wheels: King of the Road and Coin Crew Game’s first original title, Battle Bowling.
Battle Bowling pits up to four players against each other, frantically spinning large orbs through perilous courses to knock down more pins. It confuses your mind.
A pandemic occurred during the development of the 3rd Cabinet, 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 into the digital space.
And so the Escape Academy was born!
Differences and transitions between physical and digital
Unlike most digital titles, the physical experience takes anywhere from 3 to 60 minutes, so a key element is making the game immediately understandable without a tutorial. Players should understand the purpose just by looking at the cabinet. Practicing simplicity was a key factor in making Escape Academy accessible.
For Hot Wheels: King of the Road, the goal is simple. Beat your friends and reach the finish line before anyone else.
When it comes to puzzle design, building hints and methods for players to guess the solution is a key factor. In a real escape room, all Players spend much of their experience inspecting objects to determine their relevance to the puzzle, as seemingly potential clues. Recreating this digitally would require that every object in the environment be programmed as interactive, which presented a challenge in terms of scope.
Because of this engineering limitation, we decided to be very selective about which parts of the environment were made interactive, giving us a great deal of control over guiding the player’s path through the room. rice field. This was a key way to keep the room balanced and keep all the puzzles accessible rather than overwhelming. Naturally, this “balancing” process requires trial and error. But Coin Crew Games had already established a rigorous playtesting force for the physical experience, another key part of the process that required digital translation.
In the past, we watched people play, recording how they moved through space, body posture, and how hard they applied to the machine. The move to digital has led him to run two to six playtests a week, sharing game views on players’ screens and team members observing play patterns. We encouraged playtesters to discuss their thought processes for focusing on misleading clues while solving puzzles.
art and environment
Operating in a digital space frees you from the laws of physics, space constraints, and cumbersome safety exemptions, giving you greater freedom in designing your environment. However, we needed to establish certain pillars around environment design to serve the gameplay and keep things focused.
The most important principle we established was to allow for diverse yet thematically consistent puzzles in each room setting. Putting a computer-based binary cipher in a cafeteria doesn’t seem thematically appropriate, and having an entire escape room level in a janitor’s closet doesn’t allow for a deep pool of diverse puzzles. is not.
Pictured above is an art class-themed level, Escape Artist, that unlocks the ability to tackle spatial reasoning and other visually-driven puzzles.
Another escape room design that gave flexibility to the digital environment was the “ticking clock” in the room as the reason for the universe having a time limit. Flooding towers and burning libraries are like clockwork only possible in the medium of video games. After confirming that the room theme could adequately provide the design space for the puzzle, the narrative and puzzle teams worked together to establish the exciting stakes that the level could express through art, sound, and story.
Iterate and extend
The ability to update, iterate, and respond to feedback within the product itself is another great boon that digital titles offer, and we’ve done our best to leverage this in many ways. His upcoming DLC, Escape from the Past, will tell a prequel story centered around an academy criminal that gives players control over the mystery itself.
We were concerned that Whodunnit would feel underwhelming if players weren’t given the opportunity to solve cases on a level-by-level basis. This challenge required us to push our escape room mechanics to the limit.
We wanted to give the player a sense of agency in the mystery, and explore ways to tie the narrative more closely to the puzzles and push the premise. This allowed players to identify the culprit by hiding relevant clues across all levels. We also developed a new mechanic featuring a branching sequence at the final level. This mechanic takes the player down different puzzle paths depending on which faculty they accuse as the culprit.
we’re not going anywhere
After releasing our first digital title, the Coin Crew Games team was delighted with the warm welcome to the indie development scene. It’s been great interacting with players, developers, and the PlayStation Indies team, and we can’t wait to continue working with you to build exciting digital experiences that leverage physical environments.
Keep an eye out for Escape Academy: Escape from the Past releasing on June 19th and future Escape Academy updates.
