This is the final play journal, and (Surprisingly) it is about the final project I am working on.

Discord Escape Room

Rachel, Madi, and I are working on a cool escape room that trying to adapt discord as a platform. While designing this escape room, a comment made by Patrick about my first project.

What is special about this game? Why do I have to play this game on discord?

We design most of our puzzles with this question in our minds. I believe Madi and Rachel may already include some examples of our puzzles in their weekly journal. (If they don’t, well, I will put the link to our game here after we finished it.)

But, in short, we design our puzzle in a way that you can only solve it when players are using discord.

Discord Escape Room is still an Escape Room

The focus of this play journal will be how to make a discord channel feels like an Escape Room and summarize a few of my own understanding about Escape Room.

(Special Thanks to Patrick, he give me a lot of inspiration on understanding escape room)

When I think about the escape room, I think about a mysterious haunted room that full of puzzles and driven by a weird story. As a result, when I designing this escape room, I somehow get in the wrong direction that we need a story or theme to design puzzles base on that. (Like what I usually do when I make games)

There is nothing wrong with adding more and more storytelling to make the players’ experience better, but the core of the escape room should be the puzzle itself.

Once the player gets into an escape room, they need to find a way to solve the puzzle with tools and hint they have in the scene. Players need to solve the puzzle by messing around tubes if they are locked in the drainage system; They need to use chemicals and substances to solve the puzzle if they are locked in an alchemist’s room, etc.

It is a completely new design flow for me, and it is so educational. It seems obvious that

designers need to design puzzles base on the theme of the escape room.

However, this designing experience on discord is so special that I realized that

designers need to design puzzles base on the platform of the escape room.

The core of the escape room is never about its theme, the theme is always a part of the puzzle that make all the solution to a puzzle seems logic.

I got a lot of inspiration from watching this TV series.

Race To Escape

Simulate a real escape room.

When we design an escape room in discord, I think it is very important to remember that discord is an online chat software.

As a result, we put public spaces in the discord in order to let the players chat, form teams, and entertain before and after they played through our escape room.

It is a part of a well-played game. The goal of playing escape room, from my own perspective, is never to solve the puzzle but to have a chance to solve the puzzle and conquer difficulties with friends or strangers. People go to an offline escape room in order to hang out with friends and know each other better. We really want to recreate this functionality for our online escape room, so I spend hours on making a queue system to make sure a large group of players can get into this server and chat about the game before and after they play the game.