Portable Game Cores
Portable Game Extensions
Premade Games
AccessoriesHow to design a game for the Explorer Case?
Here are some pro tips about creating your first game with our best selling product!
Designing your own portable escape room is easier than you might think. However, before you start working on your project, you need to answer a few basic questions. Jumping straight into the element of design can be disastrous, so I strongly encourage you not to skip the planning step.
Take a piece of paper and a pen or open text document and write down the following assumptions for your portable escape room project:
1. How long should the game last?
Ideally, it should last from 15 to 60 minutes. During longer games, people lose their concentration and it’s harder to keep their attention. Needless to say, the longer you play, the more puzzles and extras you need to add to your project.
Remember that you can reprogram the Explorer Case at any time, so we recommend keeping your first game a bit shorter.
2. Who is the primary recipient of entertainment?
A game designed for children and adults should be approached differently, so you need to specify the age range of the players. Our experience shows that it is worth choosing 2 groups: children up to 12 years old and all the others.
We consider planning tasks and puzzles for children to be more difficult, but if you decide to serve little customers, we recommend that you base the game mostly on learning through play.
Please note that the Explorer Case should not be used by children under 12 without adult supervision. The suitcase is quite heavy!
3. Where will the game take place?
Our prop has a built-in battery, so your game can take place anywhere. You can designate a place at your company’s headquarters or offer access to customers.
If you’re already running an Escape Room, you can start by using the Explorer Case as a base for a quick and simple game in the lobby, even for free. It’s a great way to collect feedback from players and get ideas for new puzzles and improvements!
4. Match the difficulty of your game to the circumstances
If your game is to serve as additional entertainment during a company meeting, the game should be quite simple and not very engaging, but if it is the main attraction of the team building event, it is worth reaching for more complicated tasks.
Thanks to the possibility of freely programming our suitcase, you can have several game scenarios and change them depending on your needs.
Explorer Case – Game flow
So you know what the basic rules of your game will be, you can proceed to the puzzle design now. Our porp has a fixed game flow, which is parallel for the first 4 modules and comes down to the final puzzle with the 5th module.
We believe that by doing this, the game becomes more engaging for all players, working on different elements to achieve common goals helps team building a lot!
Below is a simple game flow that your design needs to follow:
Now that you know the backbone, you just need to came up with some puzzle ideas for the 5 modules.
The general rule for that is you should not make single tasks too long, best puzzles are solved between 5-10 minutes
Types of Escape Room puzzles you can use in your design:
Here are some common types of puzzles that might be found in portable escape room:
- Word puzzles: These could include crosswords, anagrams, or other types of word games.
- Logic puzzles: These might include riddles or brain teasers that require you to think critically and use logical reasoning to solve.
- Physical puzzles: These might involve manipulating objects or using dexterity and hand-eye coordination to solve.
- Observation puzzles: These might involve finding hidden clues or objects, or using your powers of observation to uncover the solution.
- Cryptography puzzles: These might involve using codes or ciphers to decode messages or uncover secrets.
- Maze puzzles: These could be physical mazes you must navigate or virtual mazes you must solve through clues and logic.
- Math puzzles: These could involve calculations or problem-solving using mathematical principles.
