Cosmic Crisis

A key character in the game is Hermes, an AI sidekick and pilot of the spaceship. Hermes helps players along the way by providing mission-critical analysis and suggestions as calamities ensue. We took The Escape Game’s character design and turned it into a customizable kit that allows TEG to quickly iterate new videos, including custom clues to be used in the clue system developed by our team.

Our team had a blast creating a fully functional asteroid game using the Unreal game engine. Periodically throughout the experience, players are distracted from the physical puzzles by a surprise asteroid shower. They must rush to the space ship’s console, charge the plasma blaster, and then aim and fire the cannon to destroy the incoming debris before it hits the ship and causes damage.

A key requirement for this game was non-linear and real time visuals for the ‘windows’ that looked out from the spaceship and the space station. Our team utilized the Unreal game engine to develop full cinematic animations from the flight out to the space station, the docking sequence, as well as the explosion of the black hole at the climax of the game. The process began with storyboarding out the entire flow of events and then modeling, lighting, and animating all of the elements required to create the visuals.

One of our favorite elements of immersive content is how the physical and digital work together. The central tower puzzle  requires players to destabilize an Antimatter device (central tower) in order to create a bomb to blow up the black hole and save the universe. As players complete puzzles elements in the room the space station screen updates, serving as a progress bar for the team to see what parts of the tower they have effectively destabilized.

All of the displays are controlled by a central web application server. This allows The Escape Game staff to fully control the experience by sending commands to the game clients for real time interaction. Whether players are having difficulty or breezing through, the game master can scale difficulty as well as provide pre-rendered or custom feedback to ensure the best gaming experience possible.