Concept: Escape Your Neighborhood!
By Alexandra Moore, Drew Silva, Jake Restaino, Melanie Zhou, and Uma Phatak
Intro (Premise, like 2 sentences):
After another lonely year in your dreary, isolated EVGR dorm room, you are given the chance to break free, and escape to the most beautiful row house in the neighborhood of your choice. But this escape will not come easy; your mental, physical, and technical skills will be put to the test as you seek refuge in a more cheery part of campus.
Story (What do the players discover as the game goes on? What is the narrative?):
The game is a challenge to escape the repressive, arbitrary, and confusing Stanford neighborhood system.
Our primary protagonists are friends in a Stanford draw group— friends most likely brought together by their freshman dorm— fighting for their chance at the best housing on campus. These friends will no longer stand for the one room doubles, random roommates, bad dining hall food, and limited row house options brought upon by Stanford’s neighborhood system. They choose to compete in Persis’ last act as Vice Provost: a mind-bending, friendship-building, once-in-a-Stanford-experience game to escape.
The game begins with the protagonists escaping their neighborhood. They find a secret puzzle, which they must solve in order to escape. As the game progresses, they discover that there is a puzzle in each neighborhood that they must solve under immense time pressure to get the chance to choose their own housing for their last year on campus. These puzzles test their Stanford historical and cultural knowledge, ultimately becoming the hardest “problem set” they’ve ever had to complete. From each puzzle, they find a part of a code that they must combine at the end in an ultimate puzzle to win. The game, which requires the utmost amount of collaboration and teamwork, brings this draw group closer together than ever.
If this draw group succeeds in their endeavors, they win the agency to live anywhere (MTL’s house, Stanford’s best row house, off-campus, etc). No matter what, the draw group will walk away with stronger bonds that will make their last year on campus fun no matter what!
Tone:
In our game, the players will navigate a series of puzzles to rebel against the Stanford administration and change their housing neighborhood. This premise requires a comical and satirical tone, as this set-up humorously contrasts with the often more serious and threatening themes of an average escape room. We intend to portray the Stanford administration as exaggerated villains and exaggerate the most dreary elements of an EVGR room setting in order to most effectively satirize the neighborhood/housing system.
We will also employ a vaguely sinister tone when it comes to the actions of the villainous administrators, portraying them as powerful, shadowy figures (which also serves to build the comedic/satirical tone). They will go to great lengths to keep the noble students from their dream dorm room.
Setting:
The setting of our game will be an EVGR dorm room on Stanford’s campus. The room will be decorated with drab aesthetics, highlighting the monotonous atmosphere that our players will wish to escape and motivating their dream of earning the housing of their choice. The room will also contain the basic possessions of a college student: a bed, a desk, a computer, a closet, a bathroom, and so forth. There could be more devious objects planted within the room as well. Have the malicious housing administrators placed listening devices or booby traps in the room? This remains to be foreseen.
Gameplay (Mechanics and Key Challenges for Players):
We have a few ideas for a) common mechanics that we want to incorporate throughout the game, and b) specific puzzles that we want to incorporate. They are listed in sections below:
Common mechanics:
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- Teams work together to solve puzzles. One of our main aesthetics is Fellowship, so we want the puzzles in the room to encourage collaboration, not competition.
- Puzzles are cumulative and strictly sequential. Similar to the above, in order to keep all team members working together on puzzles we want puzzles to lead to one another. Thus, team members will have less opportunities for distraction or splintering off from the core. We also think making the puzzles sequential (i.e. not allowing for puzzles to be done at the same time) will make our life as designers easier, although we recognize that many successful real escape rooms allow for simultaneous puzzle-solving.
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- Puzzles have a narrative explanation. While a main aesthetic for us is not Narrative, we like the idea of puzzle motivations and solutions fitting into our story, to provide players with a more narrative incentive to keep going.
- The resource of time is limited. We treat time as the primary resource our players have, and will limit it as such, to add to the aesthetic of Challenge. We are currently setting our time limit at 1 hour, but this will evolve as we develop our concept.
- One hint per puzzle, with a maximum of three. We will give players three maximum hints while they are in the room, and have one hint prepared per puzzle.
Specific puzzles:
- A map. Given that our concept is escaping the neighborhood system, but we’re currently setting our puzzles in just one room, we want to provide narrative motivation and explanation using a physical map of Stanford which is annotated with the neighborhoods. We are currently thinking about this map as the object that starts off the escape room, and the object that guides players through the room as it progresses. (i.e. Maybe players start with the premise that they need to journey through all neighborhoods to escape them all. At each neighborhood, they encounter a different puzzle, which gives them part of a code. At the end, they combine this code with an existing code on the map, like a final puzzle, to ultimately escape.) This will contribute to the aesthetic of Discovery.
- A puzzle involving randomness. Inspired by the guest lecture on 5B, we want to try to design a puzzle that uses randomness in a fun way, mostly so we can get experience as game designers with this!
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- Crossword. This is a fun type of game that one of our group members is passionate about, and wants to include.
- Digital component. We are currently thinking about maze in Unity, or maybe a puzzle involving Arduino. This could be a good place to incorporate randomness.
- Finding hidden objects / deciphering codes. These are typical escape room puzzles, and contribute to our aesthetic of Challenge.
Key Challenges for Designers (us)
- Design
- Designing the physical structure of the escape room. With limited resources and real estate, it could be difficult to truly evoke feelings of pressure to escape.
- Creating challenges that are designed to be completed in our time frame while still maintaining our desired level of difficulty
- Designing an enticing narrative
- Ensuring that challenges encourage collaboration / fellowship
- Creating clues
- Connecting challenges to theme
- Tech
- With a limited amount of Unity experience among our team members, creating our digital component might be a novel challenge for our development team. With our seemingly endless collection of ideas, it might be somewhat frustrating if our ideas are forced to remain conceptual due to this lack of experience.
- On the other hand, to actually implement several of these challenges, we will be tasked with learning and implementing games in Unity.
- One of our possible challenges includes an Arduino component, and this implementation could be difficult, once again due to a lack of experience.
- Art
- Crafting decorations for our physical room
- Creating aesthetically pleasing graphics for any digital components
Who is this for?
2-6 people (your draw group). Any background (not just CS students!)
This is for the frustrated Stanford student that dreams of the day when they can escape this arbitrary, confusing system, and regain the freedom to live where they want to with the people they want to! This game is to be played with your draw group, and can be played with students of any skillset. Since there will be at least one digital element, having a student with some CS experience could be useful, but is definitely not necessary to escape the neighborhood! Our journey is for all students, we’re all in this together against ResX!
Aesthetics of Play?
This game combines elements of challenge, fellowship, and discovery, in that order of importance. As this is an escape room, we create a sense of tension and engagement with challenges that players must overcome in order to progress. Doing this with your “draw group” brings about camaraderie and collaboration, bringing a social element to the game. As the player progresses on their journey to escape the neighborhood, they uncover new information and possibilities. Some of this information will be related to the convoluted neighborhood system, and serve as a satisfying satire on the unsavory new system, disliked by most students. We likely begin in a dreary dorm room, and move outside into the sunlight in between tasks as you get closer to your goal of escaping the neighborhood system.
Appendix
Uma’s post: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2023/05/04/individual-deliverables-p2-uphatak/
Melanie’s post: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2023/05/07/checkpoint-1-concept-doc-individual-contribution/
Drew’s post: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2023/05/09/concept-doc-individual-contribution/
Sasha’s post: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2023/05/09/individual-deliverables-p2-amoore5/
Jake’s post: https://mechanicsofmagic.com/2023/05/09/p2-concept-doc-individual-deliverables-jake/
