From 2019 to early 2020 I created a large scaled escape game in the start-up Ingame Studio. The brief was to make the 200+ engineering school Telecom Paris' students simultaneously visit the new campus through a 1 hour escape game. I designed the puzzles in all rooms needed to be visited, playtested them in both small and real scale, as well as created and set up the visuals of the environments and puzzles.
Puzzle design
The escape game was spread through all of the essential places of the campus (mediatech, classrooms, breakroom...) all placed on 3 floors. The students were separated in 30 groups of 5 to 6 people, and 10 groups started on each floor. Every 20 minutes, each group had to change floors and discover the new rooms which implied a precise logistic mapping.
Excluding the moving time, students had to spend about 14 minutes puzzle solving on each floor.
Puzzles therefore had to be short and relatively challenging for engineering students (we ended up with 70% victory rate approx.).
I created an explicative document for each puzzle, one for us (design team), and one for the 20 game masters we receruited so they could effectively rearrange each room after one groupe had finished solving the puzzle.
For testing, each room was first replicated in our workspace and tested with students from our engineering school. A few weeks before the event, we had an real size playtest in the actual Telecom Paris' campus with staff members from the school to test all of the logistics and decor.
Visuals
Our goal was to create realistic yet not too expensive environments due to the very large scale of the escape game. On each floor, we had to reproduce 10 times each environments so the 10 groups could play simultaneously.
I worked with Photoshop and Illustrator to create the puzzles visual assets as well as decorative elements such as large vinyl stickers to paste on windows to imitate book shelves or archive boxes.
