Supporting large-scale escape rooms with a modular system

Abstract

Raccoon Serious Games hosts so called escape events. These events are similar to an escape room in which teams work together to solve puzzles, only on larger scale. Different kinds of challenges, arise when hosting these events, such as monitoring the progress of the teams and managing collection of physical puzzles. For an escape event, different kinds of staff help the teams to have the best experience possible. The teams need to be able to submit their answers to puzzles, while the staff should provide them with the right materials and monitor their progress. To facilitate these needs, Raccoon Serious Games created the Massive Online Reactive Serious Escape (M.O.R.S.E) system. However, the old system lacked in the parts of modularity and flexibility, while having the event hardcoded. To solve this problem, we created a new system to improve the lesser points of the old system while also improving the usability and maintainability. Over the course of ten weeks, we researched and created the Massive Online Reactive Serious Escape 2.0 (M.O.R.S.E 2.0) system. The first part of the project consisted of researching the previous system to find the requirements for a new system. After that, a new system was designed and implemented from the ground up. M.O.R.S.E 2.0 contains all the functionality of the old system, while also improving the structure of the administrator panel. Furthermore, the final product comes with several editors, allowing for designing the puzzles, schedule and logic in the form of rulesets for an escape event and allowing multiple events to be created managed. Furthermore the configuration editor allows the employees of Raccoon Serious Games to adjust different types of settings and cosmetics. The product was successfully tested during an escape event and will be used by Raccoon Serious Games for future events.