Puzzle game
Escape from 221B
Description
A puzzle game created for the graduation project.
The player is trapped in 221B Baker Street, which seems to be a challenge given by Mr M. Good thing there is a chatbot around for company. The player needs to cooperate with the chatbot and work together to solve the puzzles in order to escape the room.
* Thanks cjbarron for the room.
"Isometric Room - 221B Baker Street" (https://skfb.ly/6EWpv) by cjbarron is licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
A gameplay video can be viewed by clicking below. Click on the star icon to try the game.
Battle Journal
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Preparation: The goal of this game is to study human trust in chatbots. To do so, my design needed to force the player to have to cooperate with the chatbot. While researching similar games and studies, I found that the gameplay of the escape room game How 2 Escape fits the purpose well. Referring to the setting of this game, I designed the cooperative escape room game.
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Puzzle design: The design of puzzles makes full use of the chatbot's feature of wide knowledge. I mainly designed 3 puzzles that involve the blind spots of players' knowledge. The puzzles are in order and have obvious guidelines, and the difficulty level increases gradually.
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Scene and theme design: I chose Sherlock Holmes as the theme, and the hints and wordings of the puzzles are all based on this theme. The scene was created using a room modelled on 221B, with the main clues located in obvious places in the room, ensuring that the initial clues and the final password page were closest to the player's starting point.
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Created the game and chatbot using Unity and inworld.ai.
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Pre-tested the game 2 times and modified some of the UI and writing based on feedback.
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Feedback
It's my second time making a game independently. It's a lot more fun and a lot more like a game this time compared to the first one, which was a visual novel full of philosophical knowledge. Puzzle design, difficulty balance, scene design, plot story, art, code, I tried to put all my experience from previous game projects into this game.
After 2 pre-tests, I had thought that the quality of the game could stand the players' test. But the truth is that the players' ideas are endless. Some players skipped the first puzzle and guessed the hints for the second puzzle by intuition. Some players chose to ignore the puzzles and focused on testing the chatbot to see if they could directly escape the room. Some players were suspicious that the chatbot would trick him and were unwilling to cooperate.
The lesson learnt this time was not to assume you can make the player do what you want, and to test more pre-tests!
However, it was really fun to watch players try all sorts of unconventional ways in my game. It felt like I was in a battle of wits with the players. There were also quite a few players discovering the Easter egg I had hidden in the game that homage to BBC Sherlock Holmes. Making the game was a really fulfilling thing. It takes a lot of time and thought to make, but watching the players get immersed in my game makes it all worth.
By the way, my favourite player comment is, ‘Ah, time's up, I'm so close to solving the puzzle, let me try again!’