Studio: Sony Immersive Music Studios
Engine: Unreal Engine – Blueprints
Role: Game Development Intern
Summary: A 30-minute music-themed escape room
Responsibilities: Design, Gameplay Programming, UI/UX, Level Design

• Showcased to Sony Music Executives
• Created 14 unique, thematic puzzles, fully implementing 6, including randomly selected variants
• Designed the level to mirror real recording studios, while isolating players to softly tutorialize mechanics

Click Here to read the full design document.

Design Goals

1. Create a replayable music-focused experience
2. Ground the escape room in reality
3. Introduce new players to the conventions of escape rooms

Some of the requirements that were given to me during development were that:

• The escape room had to be music-themed.
• The escape room could be integrated into a larger experience, so there should be some incentive for players to replay the experience.
• The larger experience would be a live-service game, so updates could not be high investment.
• I couldn’t ask the full-time staff for assistance.

Given these constraints, a recording studio the most compelling narrative structure for the escape room. I designed the layout of the escape room to that of the African Music Institute Recording Studios. This top-down design lead to some interesting puzzle designs, but I should have been more willing to also include more bottoms-up puzzles for the sake of novelty.

To address the requirement for replayablity, I created dynamicly generating puzzles, so that the answer to any specific puzzle was different each time the player entered the experience. This would mean that players can’t directly copy a youtube tutorial for the puzzles, and on replays couldn’t input a pre-memorized code.

I believe that this randomization was only partially successful at achieving my goals. Although it did achieve the goals directly stated above, it did not create a significantly different feeling experience on repeat playthroughs, so players would not be incentivised to play it multiple times. In addition to the randomization of the answer from an individual puzzle, it would have been more effective to randomize whole puzzles.

Puzzle Design Showcase

Of the puzzles I created for Studio Ignite, I am most proud of the very first puzzle that players experience.

I believe that first puzzle in an Escape Room is the most important in the entire experience, as it establishes the location, tone, themes, and difficulty. As such, Studio Ignite restricted the player to a small environment and a single lock to limit the number of potential factors that can distract the player.

This first room teaches the player:

• Basic controls and expectations for interacting with objects
• Puzzles will require audio to solve them
• There are hints around the room that you can read