Hi there, I thought I would try my hand at putting a few ideas online. These are ideas that I really want to talk about but don't seem to find the time to talk about. They might also be concepts that I do get to talk about from time to time, but don't get to go into as much depth as I would like. I imagine this will often look at game design, but I might go into other topics too.
Escape Rooms and Raid Bosses
Making an escape room is a lot like designing a raid boss in WoW. This might sound a bit odd, and given that I haven't designed any of the fights in an MMO, you might ask how I can make a claim like that. Well I have had my share of raiding/raid leading, and helped build an escape room for the Loveland Living Planet Aquarium in Draper, Utah. Let me show you how designing an escape room and raid bosses are not dissimilar.
When designing either situation you need to keep a few things in mind. The most important being that everyone needs something to do that ties to their skill sets. In an MMO this can be mapped to the type of role you are playing (Tank, Melee DPS, Ranged DPS, Healer; and broken down further depending on the classes/skills within a role.) In an escape room you have a handful of people (generally 8-12) some of these people might be better at math problems, while others are better at word problems, or logic puzzles. (Extra Credits has a fantastic video about this.) You don't have strict classes to follow and you will never be in a situation where a team CAN'T solve something, in short you will never not have a tank. But you have people who are more skilled at such things, and remember as designers your job is to create an enjoyable experience for people. So, don't make a math problem that requires anything to difficult, but challenging enough to feel rewarding.
That brings us into difficulty, for an escape room you want to be challenging. You don't want everyone to clear your room, the success rate will vary and if you were to design several rooms you would want rooms of different difficulties so that players will come back for harder rooms. This is different than building a single boss fight, you might want this fight to be easy and players will beat on their first attempt (first boss in the raid for example) or really hard that requires players to retry the fight and change their tactics. But if you look at designing several rooms for a single location you can start to see that it is like designing a raid full of bosses, each challenging different thing, and of varying difficulties.
Moments of Triumph. These are points in an MMO where you switch to a new phase of the boss, maybe the game plays some dialog, or the boss runs away for a moment. These work to give the player a quick break but also act as a signal that you accomplished something. In an escape room this could be the moment you find the end of a puzzle chain granting you a required component for the final key. This gives lets the players know that they passed all challenges and are tangibly closer to completing the room. Players get a moment to take a breath, but the clock is still ticking, where as a break in a raid will often be set by the designers here the break is momentary and less focused on taking a breath.
The last similar thing that I want to touch on is to have a solid theme, no one wants to do an escape room that is just random puzzles. Some of the best rooms I have seen are build around a theme of some kind. It could be a zombie outbreak, sword in the stone, or prison break, but have a theme and tie all your puzzles back into that. Just like a good raid fight has a theme such as: don’t spread the disease or become a vampire. And the raid itself has a theme that all fights tie back into, you get so much extra excitement and interest from players when you tie things into a theme.
But they aren't exactly the same, you don't get replayability in an escape room where as raids and raid bosses are designed to be played by the same person each week. Unfortunately, this is the case with most puzzle games, and it is the same for an escape room. If you don't solve the puzzle in the 1-hour time limit you can come back, but you should already know how to solve most of the puzzles or maybe even have some solutions memorized. A single room can't really change to much (really only padlock combinations) and stay the same room. So, lack of replayability is the biggest difference between an escape room and a raid.
I started writing this because I wanted to talk about my time making an escape room but thought comparing escape rooms to raid bosses would be more interesting to readers. It was fun to write, and I hope I was able to point out some interesting things for you as designers. I would like to talk about designing an escape room for the aquarium's summer camp it went really well, and I'm told might become a standard part of the aquarium depending on how it does next summer. Maybe then you'll finally see the post about designing that.