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Escape Room Projects @ UT Austin
Overview:
During my time at UT, I was very involved with Texas Theme Park Engineering and Design (TxTPED). This student organization puts on themed entertainment events on campus every semester, and I got the opportunity to work on 5 of these events, helping to lead 3 of them. From escape rooms to haunted houses to immersive board games, each of these were a great chance to collaborate and design, build, playtest, and run a large-scale immersive experience.
Final Exam: Campus Conquest
Project Type: Immersive/Interactive Board Game Experience
Date: Spring 2024
My role: Project Director
In the Spring of 2024 I led the club's first "board game experience". Puzzles, projection, and a game moderator guided guests through an immersive version of the game Risk to conquer UT's campus.
Playtesting:
An experimental project like this is heavily reliant on play-testing to ensure smooth run-throughs for the paid guests. I was very excited to invite my Professor and classmates from the design course I was taking, Play Design Lab, to playtest our project and give us feedback before our first ticketed slots. It was extraordinarily helpful in showing us how much time was needed for different puzzles, how many game pieces each team should get, and other specifics.
The timeline shows how each team was kept on track leading up to our build and run days.
Overall, Campus Conquest was a huge success. We sold over 100 tickets, broke even on our spendings, and were even featured in an article in the Daily Texan, a student newspaper on campus. The experience taught me how to manage a project from beginning to end, how to problem solve and deal with unexpected scenarios, how to motivate a team, and market new experiences. Shown below are images of some planning documents.
Escape from Wonderland
Project Type: Escape Room
Date: Spring 2025
My role: Creative Co-Manager
Escape from Wonderland featured 3 themed rooms, 8 puzzles, and our first animatronic. As Creative Co-Manager, I oversaw the creative intent of the project going from initial design to final execution, managed creative teams such as Set Dressing, Marketing, and Lighting and Music, and worked with the Project Director and Technical Co-Manager to ensure that all project teams were aligned.
Missing on the Moon
Project Type: Escape Room
Date: Fall 2023
My role: Creative Co-Manager
Missing on the Moon was an escape room centered on the story of 4 missing astronauts on aerospace company SOLAR's moon base. As with all of TxTPED’s projects, the story is our the first priority. We began with the narrative of a mysterious disappearance of astronauts from a moonbase, and eventually developed this into four unique characters, a discovery journey for the guest experience, and puzzle sequence planning.
One of the creative challenges that I worked on in this project was the mood shift that occurred about halfway through the escape room. At first, guests entered a living area, with relaxing jazz music playing and warm colors being brought out by the props and lighting. However, once they discover that the previous astronauts were eaten by vicious aliens, the mood switches to an eerie, suspenseful, race to escape.
We achieved this sudden change by making the “power go out” with a loud crash, and subsequent flashing lights, and then guiding guests into our third room with colder colors, strange alien “goo” all over the set, and urgent audio cues. I loved watching guests react to this change- my favorite part is always seeing the emotional reactions that our work can cause.
Escape from Lydia's Hollow & Quest for the Fabled Fortune
For the projects I was not on leadership for, I worked on the puzzles team, designing, play testing, and fabricating a puzzle for each experience.
A puzzle I designed that has guests connect certain cities on a map with string. The coordinates of the intersection provide them with the code to a lock in the room.
A puzzle I designed in which guests must find the connection (an article date) between a missing poster on the wall and newspaper articles in a trunk.
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