Before Escape Academy, Coin Crew Games produced location-based entertainment (LBE) experiences such as escape rooms and arcade cabinets. Producing an escape room called Space Squad in Space is how Wyatt Bushnell and Mike Salyh met, placing them on the path to founding Coin Crew Games.
The original goal for the studio was to design casual arcade experiences for large groups of friends to have some friendly competition. These first arcade cabinets took the shape of the licensed racing machine Hot Wheels: King of the Road and Coin Crew Game’s first original title, Battle Bowling.
Battle Bowling pits up to four people against each other who must frantically spin a large orb to navigate a hazardous track and knock over the most pins. It will bowl your mind.
During the development of our third cabinet, the pandemic struck, forcing the closure of physical entertainment spaces. We figured out how to translate our talent and experience into a digital title. This exploration brought us to the idea of bringing the escape room experience to the digital space.
And thus, Escape Academy was born!
The difference in physical versus digital and making the transition
Unlike most digital titles, physical experiences range from three to sixty minutes, so a key component is ensuring the game is immediately understandable with zero tutorialization. Players need to understand the objective simply by looking at the cabinet. Becoming practiced at simplicity was a key component in making Escape Academy accessible.
In the case of Hot Wheels: King of the Road, the goal is simple. Outdrive your friends and be the first to the finish line.
Regarding puzzle design, an essential component is building clues and ways for players to deduce the solution. In real-life escape rooms, everything is a potential clue at first glance, so players spend much of the experience inspecting objects to determine their relevance to the puzzles. To recreate this digitally, every object in the environment must be programmed as an interactable, which posed a challenge scope-wise.
This engineering limitation made us decide to be very selective about what pieces of the environment became interactable, which afforded us much control over guiding the player’s path through the room. This was a critical way that balanced our rooms and ensured that all the puzzles remained accessible instead of overwhelming. Naturally, this “balancing” process takes some trial and error. However, Coin Crew Games had already established a rigorous playtesting regiment for their physical experiences which was another essential part of the process needing a digital translation.
In the past, we would observe people playing and note how they moved through the space, their body posture, and how many quarters they put into the machine. The shift to digital evolved into running 2-6 playtests a week while the players’ screen shared their game view and team members observed the play patterns. We encouraged our playtesters to discuss their thought processes while solving puzzles to hone in on misleading clues.
Art and environment
Operating in the digital space allows for immense latitude in environment design because the laws of physics, space cons