Holiday Escape
The 2021 Installation of Worcester Polytechnic Institution’s annual escape room event designed, ran and hosted by students and faculty.
Details
Holiday Escape was a week-long escape room installation designed and built by 16 graduate and undergraduate students.
The project involved the design, implementation, and integration of 10 unique challenges centered around codebreaking, strategy, and skill-based puzzles.
The escape room and its challenges were tuned for teams of 5-7 participants.
The puzzles were created by the team and included a variety of techniques, materials and custom electronics such as microcontroller-driven buttons, lights, solenoids, and locks in combination with traditional combination locks.
There were two stages (and subsequently two unique areas) of our escape room. The first stage was the train platform. In this stage players had to solve puzzles to unlock the train to proceed to stage 2.
The puzzles began before they entered the space as they were given tickets for the train ride when they were checking in for their time slot and these tickets were the key to the first puzzle!
After unlocking the train, one of our team members played the role of The Conductor and would slide open the door for players from inside of the train! It was always incredibly entertaining to see players reactions to a surprise greeting.
The second stage of the escape room (inside of the train) featured a live view out the "windows" of the train using 2 TVs driven by a Unity scene. The train ride footage was actual footage from the local train ride from Worcester, MA (the city this was all taking place) and Boston, MA!
This Unity scene became interactive in the final puzzle where player's must all work together to press buttons located around the room based on directions from a helpful snowman outside the window.
In order to achieve the two stage progression of the escape room, we had to build a custom wooden wall that split the IMGD Lounge we were using for the escape room in half.
We also needed this wall to host the sliding door we needed for when players opened the second stage and for the wall to hold up TVs for our train and snowman media.
The room was set up with a control system that utilized a custom timer program with "cutscene" video. The control system provided a live video and audio feed of the full room to the game-master located outside. The puzzle master, playing the role of Jingle the Elf - leader of the elf crew that hijacked the train- was able to communicate with players in real-time via a 2-way audio stream (the train's "PA system" and some hidden microphones), in order to give help, provide punny hints and comedic commentary.
Performance
The escape room was very popular and well received!
It was entirely sold out before our first official game. We also received strong positive feedback and praise from customers, both who were new to the WPI annual escape room and those who had been participating since 2017! Our tuning had proven to be successful as we had a 90% completion rate with no players rating the escape room as too easy!
My Specific Contributions
As may be expected, the team all worked together on practically every aspect of this project.
However, some of the more focused areas I led included being the Lobby Design & Build Lead, a puzzle designer, graphic designer, and the POS and introductory member for participants.
I led the team in decorating the lobby, setting up photo ops and winner/loser boards as well as managing scheduling of team members for POS. As part of this, I designed and created the winner/loser boards within our holiday theme, created a giant sleigh for our photo op at the end and created all graphics used in advertising.
Win Condition Cards
Lose Condition Cards
The annual escape room project was pioneered by Professor Dean O'Donnell and performed on an alternating basis through his course on Design of Interactive Experiences. Teams of volunteers would champion the project in years the course was not offered.
Holiday Escape was the last escape room designed and built at WPI under Dean's guidance. I am endlessly thankful to have had the opportunity to work with him on what numerous attendees declared the best escape room yet.
Credit to Max Chen, the lead puzzle designer on the project, and Darren Cole, our video and production expert, for the demo reel featured above.
Credit also to Mikel Matticoli, our awesome project producer and technical director, for the great documentation!
