[Approved] Escape the Lab

[Juno]

Welcome to Escape the Lab, a cooperative escape room game! Investigate clues in a series of rooms with your team to be the first to solve all the puzzles.

overview

• Every participant can choose one location to investigate every day in the current room. To make this easier for myself to keep track of, this resets at 12AM PST.

↳↳↳↳ This is intended to be a cooperative game, so if multiple people in your team participate, you as an individual should not have to worry about picking up additional locations to investigate, but the option is there if needed.

• Investigating will yield either clues or items that will be useful down the line. Items need to be combined to be used, so be sure to discuss and share your findings with your teammates.

• Not every search will yield a key clue! There will be a few throwaway clues in each room, so if something's not making sense, it's either too early to use it or just a dud.

↳↳↳↳ To save time, if what you chose to investigate is not a real clue or a 'planned' dud, I will let you know right away, ie. if you chose to stare at a wall and it is literally just a blank wall, I will let you know that was just part of the environment and you can choose again for the day.

• There is only one set solution for every room, and the first team to solve it as intended wins. This isn't a roleplay or D&D, so there are no extra points for creativity here, I'm afraid. ...Or is there? (check achievements)

submitting your moves

Once a room is revealed, you can post in this thread which area you want to investigate and I will DM or PM you (based on your preference) the accompanying clue/mislead. Only the first person who picks an item to investigate will receive the details of it, so this will help you and your teammates see which areas have already been checked.

Template for investigation:

PC Username:
Team:
Discord Username (only if you prefer to be contacted via Discord): ^note*
Investigate: ^note**

_{* If you want to be DMed, please make sure you are able to receive DMs from non-friends, otherwise I will PM you on the forum.}

^{** It's fine if you don't know what something is called, I'm not going to quibble over whether a furniture piece is a dresser or a chest of drawers and if I don't know what you mean I'll ask for clarification}

To then use the item, you just have to PM/DM me back your action. All valid moves are going to be in conjunction with another item - for example, if you found a piece of paper, you know it will have to be used with something, and you can't just, say, submit a move to me that's like "I fold this into a paper airplane".

If you are using it in conjunction with someone else on your team's item, please have both players message me so I know you both agreed to try using your items together.

scoring

The first team to solve a room gets 50 points, and the next room will be revealed. The losing team can still figure out the solution to older rooms for 30 catch-up points, but you will, then, of course risk losing the next room as well, and so on. So prioritize carefully!

final notes

There is a total of 3 rooms of varying sizes for this event - a lobby, a breakroom and the main lab, so you have an idea of how long this will run and how to prioritize it among the other events.

The first room will be posted shortly after GT begins. Have fun!

 

[Arcaneum]

.​

Exciting!!!! I just want to sorta discuss the logistics of multiple people on each team doing this.

From what I can tell, essentially the more people looking the better, as each person can choose to look at something separately? My only concern is that sometimes people will absolutely flood events like these and you may end up with say 10+ people participating for a team, meaning they could potentially solve a room in no time at all. I may just be underestimating how much there is to look at and therefore there's enough clues/complexities that it probably isn't going to be solved quickly by sheer numbers.

Points-wise, I think the standard 150 for 1st (presumably whoever solves the rooms the fastest) and 100 for 2nd would I think be fine, with perhaps some point bonuses for things like finishing a room first? Could also put that under Achievements though.

 

[gimmepie]

Exciting!!!! I just want to sorta discuss the logistics of multiple people on each team doing this.

From what I can tell, essentially the more people looking the better, as each person can choose to look at something separately? My only concern is that sometimes people will absolutely flood events like these and you may end up with say 10+ people participating for a team, meaning they could potentially solve a room in no time at all. I may just be underestimating how much there is to look at and therefore there's enough clues/complexities that it probably isn't going to be solved quickly by sheer numbers.

Points-wise, I think the standard 150 for 1st (presumably whoever solves the rooms the fastest) and 100 for 2nd would I think be fine, with perhaps some point bonuses for things like finishing a room first? Could also put that under Achievements though.

Is that going to be enough for a collaborative event? Might be better to do slightly higher point values and award to the teams rather than individual participants?

Edit: Or smaller, but award to teams on a room-by-room basis instead.

 

[Juno]

eyyyyyyayyyay so for my first room I have 11 hints hidden total, 3 of which are dead ends so at least 8 people would have to participate on the first day to solve the room and that's assuming they choose every correct item - I can adjust for more or less if you guys think it would be necessary to, but it wouldn't simply be up to that though since they would then have to find the right combinations of clues to leave the room and correctly deduce how to use them.

Here is a quick example room:

I kind of just put down random shit from this Halloween-themed tileset I have lmao and made up a solution out of whatever's there, the actual rooms will be slightly more cohesive

So the solution here could be something like:

- behind one of the paintings is a small door, but it is locked by a 5-digit code
- Through the eyes of the Jack-o-lantern, you can see something inside
- Whoever investigates the doll will receive the knife it is holding. The knife will be used to carve up the pumpkin to get what's inside it
- There is a key. The key will be used to unlock the dresser's drawers.
- Dresser has a torn page in it that lines up with one of the books in the pile
- the re-assembled page says 42069, and entering the code into the door behind the painting unlocks the next room

The actual rooms will be larger with more items and not as linear but I hope that gives a better idea of what the game will be like and roughly the level of cooperation and thought that will be needed to solve a room - it will be a bit more challenging than this, not just by size of room but, for example, for paintings I will just show the painting to the person who investigated it, accompanied by flavour text that may or may not be useful, and it will be up to the player to determine which parts of the painting is important (or if all) and could be a clue for something else. A bookshelf might hold a clue, if they know which book to look at, and you would require a hint from someone else's item to nudge you towards a particular book if you don't want to pick one blindly every day.

For this particular room, the image of the painting the player who investigated it sees might be slightly off-kilter when examined up close, giving away the fact there is something behind it.

And certain items will contain an actual puzzle, like the books, for example, might reveal a cipher they will have to figure out and solve rather than just giving you the number. Or the dresser would give you this:

And you have to actually put the pieces back together to see the message, stuff like that. Let me know your thoughts!

I'm also thinking perhaps something I can add is a limit to how many times they can message me a day so I don't get spams of like:

Using my pumpkin with the doll
Using my pumpkin with the painting
Using my pumpkin with the plant
Using my pumpkin with the dresser
Using my pumpkin with the books

And so on until they get the right answer; that way they'll actually have to put a little bit of thought into how they attempt to use their items. Maybe a limit of 2 tries per person a day? They can discuss as much as they want with their team about their clue and how to use it, but only the person who initially investigated the item can submit their actions about that item.

And as for points, is your suggestion of 150 per room or for the whole event? I was thinking something similar to gp's in the op:

The first team to solve a room gets X points, and the next room will be revealed. The losing team can still figure out older rooms for X catch-up points, but you will, then, of course risk losing the next room as well, and so on. So prioritize carefully!

But I wasn't sure on the exact values - how is 50 points per room for the winning team, and then 30 for the catch-up points? I see 5 points seems to be the standard for participation in most of the other events, so even if this is purely participation that's 5 points per participant if 10 people contribute, and they do have to engage with their team/the clues in some way to contribute in order to solve the room so I think that's fair? Or not enough?? idk this is hard to gauge for me lmao

I had 4 rooms planned for the 2 weeks so by that points system the event would award a team a maximum of 200 points, but if people are absolutely ripping through them I'm sure in the two weeks' runtime I can make a final room for a bit more points that requires a bit more effort to solve.

And yeah, I do want to put up some achievements for this too, stuff for solving rooms quickest like you said - I'll get thinking on that while we work out the kinks in the points system.

 

[gimmepie]

What you say for points makes sense to me at this moment but will wait for others to weigh in on that. I think that limiting the amount of times a single person can message you about an object interaction is also a good idea.

 

[Arcaneum]

What you say for points makes sense to me at this moment but will wait for others to weigh in on that. I think that limiting the amount of times a single person can message you about an object interaction is also a good idea.

Seconding this, so I'll get this event all approved.

.​

 

[Juno]

I think I'm gonna play it safe and not do achievements because I can't really think of a lot of fair/balanced ones - speed is already rewarded by a better score for completion so it seems unfair to give an achievement for that on top of it unless I adjust the scoring to be a flat score for completion, but since this is the first time I'm trying this I think I just want to see how the event goes and if it's even fun/interesting to people - if it's a success and I've identified/ironed out the kinks I'll give it more thought for future GTs.

I kinda like the 'creative thinking' achievement I had, but it's very subjective to what I think is a clever solution, so maybe next year after I see how this goes I will be more confident in determining what a player does would be considered a clever solution.

Also slacked a bit on the mapping and puzzle-making this week so I think I'm gonna cut this down to 3 rooms so I can focus on making those 3 more solid instead of going for quantity so this miiight be a bit of a short event (again, no idea how people will receive and play this yet - maybe it'll be over in 4 days, maybe people will take their time since it is pretty player-driven and they know they have 2 weeks to do this) but it's hybrid long/short term kinda thing so a maximum of 150 points/bare minimum 90 for completion for the whole thing still isn't too bad.

posting in the main thing noww ping me if something looks off