EscapeTower

If there is something funnier than making games, is making games to collect data!

As my PhD focused on understanding how players behave the first time they enter a virtual environment they have never seen before, I needed a way to collect reliable, unbiased data about their habits, behaviors and expectations. To make sure our data matched all criteria, we needed an experience that was as close as possible to one players would have by playing any other commercial game. Our solution was to develop EscapeTower, a fully functioning EscapeRoom game that players could download from itch.io and play as they liked from the comforts of their homes and with the equipment they preferred.

An empty room with beige walls and a large window divided into multiple panes. Outside the window is a fiery landscape resembling lava or a burning environment. The contrast between the calm, empty room and the intense, fiery scene outside is striking and unusual. Two circular icons are in the bottom left corner, one depicting a key and the other a screwdriver.

The game was designed with a few key elements in mind: it had to be as culture agnostic as possible, data had to be reliably collected remotely, and few different scenarios could be played depending on the version they were playing. There would be a lot to say about the game and the different variations, but I will save you from having to read a summary of my PhD thesis.

From a purely technical standpoint, on this project I had to take care of almost everything, from the design to the programming. I created the spaces, made the system elastic enough to easily be able to create different variations of the same game (each one able to answer a specific research question), and I even wrote a C++ Unreal Engine plugin for remote data collection. A VR version was in development, but it had to be suspended because of the pandemic.

A first-person perspective from a video game or simulation. The scene includes a yellow door with a red circular lock and a keyhole. The player appears to be holding two red objects, one in each hand. The object in the left hand resembles a bracket or a tool, while the object in the right hand looks like a key. There is also a floating black sphere with a red letter 'B' on it near the door. The environment is minimalistic with white walls and a window to the right of the door.

If you’re curious about the game and want to know more, details are available on its official page.