I’ve mostly played rooms in Seattle, though I did get to play a few in San Francisco the last time I visited there. What are some of the top escape rooms you have played outside of ETA? All told, it was about a dozen people, though many of those were only involved part time at different phases of the project. We had an artist come in to paint the room, another artist produce the marketing material, and a webmaster to create and manage the website. For those rooms, I had four to six contributing designers that designed some individual puzzles based on my direction, a general contractor for building out the room, a couple technology guys building all the technology and programming the applications, and half a dozen production assistants that helped me produce all the props. I think Quest for Excalibur was three months and The Raven and the Red Death was four. We spent the next 3 hours designing the puzzles, 6 hours shopping for materials, and the final 6 hours in production.įor a normal room, I’d want one to three months of concept and design time, followed by one to three months of production. We received our theme at 6:30 in the morning and had to design and build the entire room in a hotel ballroom including certain mystery ingredients by 9:30pm that night. I’ve created a 15 minute escape room in a single day for the Extra Life charity event we ran, and that was just my twin brother, Jesse McGatha, and I doing everything. How long does the process take to design and create an escape room? How many people do you work with? Without spoiling anything, The Raven and the Red Death has one of those methods, but we have several more very interesting ideas that we still want to explore in future episodes and rooms. Obviously, multiple rooms are an obvious way to deliver on that sense of discovery, but I’m very interested as a designer in finding new ways of delivering on that sense of discovery. A more nuanced statement would be that escape rooms derive a lot of their enjoyment from a sense of discovery. A lot of people say that “games are only good if they have multiple physical rooms”, but I think that is a somewhat simplistic perspective as a designer. I’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way about what makes an engaging escape room. Next, I designed the follow-up episode for Storybook Legends set in the same physical space, The Raven and The Red Death. In about three months, we were able to finish this room, Quest for Excalibur, which despite its straightforward design, I am happy to say has been very well received. As a result, I shifted my efforts to a simplified design that mostly used technology that we already knew how to build. I spent multiple months designing this room and pushing the development of the technology when it became clear that it was going to take a lot more technology research to make that room a reality. The first room that I designed as the lead designer was a six-episode room called Alchemy Arcana. What was the first escape room you designed and how was that experience? I helped build Vault of the Volcano God and The Sparrow Files, constructing furniture, building a lot of props, and contributing to the puzzle design. How did you get into designing escape rooms?Īs I mentioned, I started designing puzzles and puzzle events years ago, so when my twin brother and other friends of mine started Epic Team Adventures in 2016, they asked me to help design some of their rooms. From there, I branched out to start designing puzzles for other large scale events like Microsoft Puzzle Hunt (~1000 people) down to small birthday and corporate events, and even private commissions for weddings or private parties. For the last few years, I have been teaching game and user experience design at DigiPen Institute of Technology, one of the top-rated game design universities in the country.Ībout 15 years ago, I started designing puzzles for the annual Microsoft Puzzle Safari, an annual letterboxing-style event hosted on the Microsoft campus. I’ve worked on over 50 titles including everything from massively multiplayer games to casual web and mobile games. I have worked for Wizards of the Coast, Microsoft Game Studios, Gazillion Entertainment, and Glu Mobile over the years as well as run my own companies. I have been a game designer and producer for the last 20 years. Richard has helped design quite a few rooms at Epic Team Adventures with his latest project being the one day (May 20) game of Scotland Yard: The Baker Street Affair in Seattle, WA. We wanted to know what goes on in a game designer's mind and the background behind creating an escape room. We had the pleasure of meeting Richard Thames Rowan while on our Seattle trip in April.
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