Midterm Reflection

The overall feedback of the midterm user test is great. Especially the dark environment makes the tomb environment eerie and that’s exactly what we want the players to experience and feel when they are trying to solve the puzzle.

For the first puzzle, players actually spent quite a lot of time figuring out how to operate the camera. To solve that, we might include a small piece of paper with “play” on the top of it on the camera, which hopefully will make anyone no matter whether they are familiar with this device or not, feel simple to play the recorded DV. Also, the audio in it seems to be a little bit small, but it does contain some important information. So we might want to do some adjustments to let players focus on the clue itself.

For the second puzzle, players seem to have difficulty finding the right place for the clues in the first place. Maybe we will make a bigger and more obvious version of the mouse of the truth to solve that. Meanwhile, after they found 2 parts of the word since we do not fix the direction of the box, the rotation makes them puzzled on how to put two parts together. I think in this case, making the box’s direction and the position fixed will make the puzzle a lot easier for them.

The latter half of this puzzle is about pouring the “blood” in the bottle into the altar. But somehow after they get the bottle, players seem to hesitate whether to open the bottle. Moreover, the slope of the altar is too flat to let the “blood” run down to the correct position. This makes our sensor have no data coming in, thus we have to open the lock manually. And the sound of unlocking is too small to let players pay attention to. After they do the right thing, because of the lack of instant feedback, they just stand in situ and wait to see how exactly the “blood” runs.

As for the general flow of the experience, there are still several points that need to pay attention to. After we introduce the “ghost” in the tomb, it seems to be unclear for players to use the mouth of the truth to pass questions and get hints. Thus we need to think more about the role of GM and how the players are supposed to know that. Another crucial problem is that our whole experience is pretty linear, but we have all the stuff in a single big empty room, so the players feel lost when they first enter the room. They have no idea what’s the starting point and what clue is related to what puzzle. In this case, we might need to think about how to structure the space and position puzzles and clues. The volume limit is also not working since outside the curtain, we cannot really evaluate how loud noise the player is making. So to make it work, we might need several microphones to generate the sound from different perspectives properly. We haven’t really thought about how the countdown system works in a tomb situation. An electronic clock seems not to be in alignment with the tomb setting. What the final treasure is, when and where it will appear also requires further investigation.

The second half of the semester, we will mainly focus on the fabrication and improvements of the existing puzzles. As a fantasy theme escape room,  the decorations inside the room are of great importance because how immersive the experience largely depends on that. The puzzles and hints might require further tests and the problems mentioned above need to be fixed as well.