Hello PlayStation puzzlers!
My name is Blair Lachlan Scott, Writer & Producer at Coin Crew Games. I’d love to tell you about how our design approach has evolved to give you an exciting new experience in our first DLC: Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Hidden Island!
Develop our design
After completing the base game, we reviewed our processes to set some goals for how we wanted to grow as a studio for our first DLC. It needs to be bigger, better and more unexpected. After some team-wide introspection, we identified three core principles to try to outperform our final recommendation.
Avoid repetition
The last thing we want after players go through twelve school-themed levels is to have the DLC feel like a remade Escape Academy. We wanted to see how far we could push our universe by taking players off campus and still keeping the world tied to our academic scene. Threading the needle between these two goals, we come to a single theme: summer vacation.
Taking the Escapists on vacation unlocks a whole new set of environments and opens the door to an impressive new room facility. Our players’ self-landing on ‘Escape-resistant Island’ also introduces a delicious dichotomy between ‘tropical island locality’ and ‘mysterious science base.’ Combining these elements both in the artistic design and level concept has resulted in some of our most interesting and quirky rooms to date.
Deepen the story
In Escape Academy, we were very careful to let the story get in the way of the puzzles. We’ve designed the story in such a way that it can be absorbed at various levels of depth, without leaving out any context for the elements within the level. What we noticed upon release was that players craved a more narrative with gameplay and puzzles.
This feedback led us to build the DLC around a linear, self-contained storyline where the level premise and story are more closely linked. While our rooms will always be playable from start to finish with no narrative context to keep the game accessible, we hope that combining level design and tight narrative Closer will lead to more stakes and deeper investment in our story, characters, and world.
Increase difficulty
Before Escape Academy, directors Wyatt Bushnell and Mike Salyh designed the escape rooms and game cabinets in the real world. There, an important part of the development was rigorous dramatization, something we moved into the development of Escape Academy. This process was invaluable in streamlining the small details of the game and improving the user experience, but it did reveal one important element. As people progressed through the entire game, they really well at it. This has resulted in some players being able to get through the higher difficulty levels without feeling the increase we anticipated and leaving them wanting a more challenging experience.
There are a lot of levers to pull when adjusting the difficulty in the puzzle game. We need to be tactical about what we pull in order to maintain a satisfying experience for our players.
Complexity: How many steps are needed to complete the puzzle? There’s a fine line between satisfying complexity and having a puzzle or puzzle sequence lose its thread.
Amount: Another ‘easy’ lever in theory, but it requires ingenuity. Our designers are very intentional with the way the puzzles are arranged and people walk through the environment. Putting too many puzzles on one level can be confusing.
Duty: How difficult is it to figure out what you have to do with a given puzzle? This is the hardest way to deal with the problem as it involves grappling with huge variations in thought processes across the entire player base. For some people, a certain puzzle will click instantly while for others it may be the game’s hardest puzzle.
So… What lever do we decide to pull?
All of them!
Escape From Anti-Escape Island’s levels are filled with intricate puzzles and intricate room flow is a natural step in the evolution of our game design. Consistent gameplay is instrumental in balancing the DLC. We hope that it will bring a challenging, satisfying and surprising experience to the players.
More to come
And again, we at Coin Crew Games find ourselves trying to determine how to push things further as we set our sights on our next big update. We can’t wait for you to play Escape From Anti-Escape Island, and we all look forward to helping you keep trying with brand new puzzles.
Escape Academy: Escape from Anti-Escape Island is available on PS4 & PS5 on November 10, 2022.
