Hey, Hacker News! I launched an escape room venue in Orlando about four weeks before everything went into COVID-19 lockdown. My team and I started noticing remote/virtual escape room offerings that were just Zoom calls where players direct a game master to look at/interact with things in a physical space.
We liked the idea of playing with a real environment from home, but wanted to give players direct control over the environment. Paranormal Panic is our first stab at a remotely playable escape room.
Players have 30 minutes to catch a ghost, and must work together as two squads. Each team connects with a separate device (laptop, desktop, or tablet), and although they have live video feeds from the same room, they see different angles inside it. They also have control over different equipment, and have different information on their control panels.
It's built using Vue, Websockets, Jitsi, Raspberry Pi HQ cameras, and Python.
We got lucky that escape rooms are a reasonably safe entertainment option (gatherings of eight or less, no strangers, sanitized, etc.) during these times, so we're fortunate to have reopened and are seeing good attendance. That said, we hope these remote experiences (esp. as team building events) will be a good supplement to our in-person business. We're developing a few other remote experiences that are more ambitious, and we expect to have them ready soon.
Thats awesome. I'm sure the orlando dev community would love to hear about the implementation side of things. I know for a fact the IOT group would love it.
Are you in the odevs slack? If not send me your email and I will get you invited.
Really cool idea. I've often thought about creating games with physical objects controlled remotely (my idea was something like RC cars). I'll give this a shot.
We were thinking of using an RC car for part of this experience, but figured we'd leave that R&D project for another day.
Our main concern was designing/modifying the car (and its play space) in such a way where it doesn't get stuck. One of our goals was to make this an experience that can be managed and reset remotely by our team, so we wanted to avoid manual intervention as much as possible.
I was thinking about using making a scale model of a cityscape and letting people race cars with cameras mounted to them. Getting stuck would be a feature (just like a real car race, if you get stuck somewhere you'll lose), and require human intervention to fix. I think latency is the real problem, games work around this in many ways that aren't possible in the real world.
You may want to check on 'Mario Kart Live: Home circuit' that Nintendo announced a few days ago. Basically an AR/VR mix of Mario Kart with real model cars running in your living room.
From my tinkering, I've found that MJPEG streams are the lowest latency live video I can get. Old school, but no buffering like HLS or MPEG-DASH, etc. I haven't tried modifying the buffering in HLS and the like to zilch (or at least as low as I can go), but that's one thing worth exploring. I keep it low res (640 x 360) and low fps, but use the new high quality Raspberry Pi cameras to get an image that looks decent regardless.
One way to get around the latency issue with RC cars is to pre-plot the path and build a puzzle around that. (Not that there has to be a puzzle in there.)
Also, if you like scale models, have we got somethin' cookin' for you!
Congrats on launching! My old football team used to do escape room as a team building exercise. Might call them up to see if they want to relive the fun!
Ha, this is ironic! Didn't escape rooms come about from 90's escape room flash games on miniclip? Now we've gone full circle making a virtual game of a real escape room modeled from a virtual room :D
This looks pretty fun, and definitely fit with the times! Splitting into two teams is also interesting.
Great idea. I would have liked to have seen a video about what actually happens - e.g. is it just some Hue lights changing colour and a LCD screen that flashes green etc, or are there actual physical things that happen in response to players? Like does a door spring open if you "hack" something from your laptop? Do you need to pan and tilt the camera around? Do you have to physically move things remotely like turn a safe tumbler to the right combination etc? Can you drive a "drone" around to take a closer look at something on the wall?
Seems like a very scalable idea though :) Good luck with it! I can imagine one or two "SREs" running a warehouse with 15 or 20 rooms all going simultaneously and there to fix/reset if 100% automation cannot be done easily (e.g. a remote drone that gets stuck/falls over).
I know during lockdown our teams have been screaming out for team building activities that can be done remotely and this sort of thing would be great.
This is very much a v1 of our take on remotely playable games. Some quick examples: Players can control light, sound, some electronics that physically move (nothing crazy for now -- a tape deck, a centrifuge), and influence a "ghostly orb" to move around the room.
Here's a peek at what's coming down the pike:
- One remote experience that's an adaptation of an existing in-person experience we have, but made in such a way that it can handle many concurrent sessions. The idea is that this'll help us with larger team building events.
- Another experience with camera control, more influence on the environment, and more elaborate sets. This is definitely going to be a first of its kind.
Would love to see something like that warehouse style operation happening!
Shoot me an email if you want to arrange some team building.
Great idea! Are the rooms reset after each round to make way for the next group, or is it built in such a way that they can continue from the previous attendees setup?
Also I think as a potential player, it would be great to see an example video of it in action within the browser. Unfortunately the idea is something that could often be done poorly with a lack of actions/control, so I would prefer to see exactly what I'm paying for in terms of the setup.
Thank you! They're designed to reset automatically!
We've got some very short clips at the end of this video to give a taste of gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQYt0L-6K-U We're probably burying it by presenting it this way.
I'll take a moment to figure out how to highlight that on the page better. Thanks for the feedback!
I like the idea so much!! Last weekend was the first time for me in an escape room and I simply loved it, would like to see how entertaining it is online. Only one doubt: isn't 30 min too little time to play it? And isn't 49$ too much for such a short time?
We've seen quite a few escape rooms charge per person or per connection for online zoom experiences. One of the largest escape room operations out there (https://theescapegame.com/remote-adventures/) charges $30 per person for their hour-long experience, and requires a minimum of four players. So that's $120 for an hour vs a $50 flat rate for 1/2 an hour. We think we're offering a good value and more interactivity.
The other reason for 30 min vs an hour is the cadence of the experience. We thought it's possible that a 60 minute experience could feel drawn out, so we opted to experiment with a well paced 30 min for our first offering.
I wonder what is the reason to make the game in the real world if it's played fully online?
Wouldn't it be possible and more cost-effective to create same room and scenarios within let's say Unity and stream videos from there?
Or is it something about the pricing?
If we can re-use an existing environment from one of our in-person rooms, the costs to get something like this up and running is marginal. We'd wind up getting a second playable experience, with a potentially wider audience, for not much more spend.
That said, this experience was purpose built to experiment with the remote game concept. (At the time, we weren't sure how to adapt our existing in-person games.) It's a small physical space (approx. 11ft x 9ft), and we used a ton of props we already had.
I was thinking the telepresence aspect of it--coupled with teamwork--was really intriguing. Imagine if office buildings were equipped with whatever advancements will come of this concept, everyone with office jobs could go back to work together but remotely.
Kinda how Second Life was too disconnected from reality, it immediately became a fantasy world. If telepresence is tied to a real location (for some definition of real, and likely to change over time), it may bridge the uncanny valley and succeed. Strange that it took a virus to get us there.
We liked the idea of playing with a real environment from home, but wanted to give players direct control over the environment. Paranormal Panic is our first stab at a remotely playable escape room.
Players have 30 minutes to catch a ghost, and must work together as two squads. Each team connects with a separate device (laptop, desktop, or tablet), and although they have live video feeds from the same room, they see different angles inside it. They also have control over different equipment, and have different information on their control panels.
It's built using Vue, Websockets, Jitsi, Raspberry Pi HQ cameras, and Python.
We got lucky that escape rooms are a reasonably safe entertainment option (gatherings of eight or less, no strangers, sanitized, etc.) during these times, so we're fortunate to have reopened and are seeing good attendance. That said, we hope these remote experiences (esp. as team building events) will be a good supplement to our in-person business. We're developing a few other remote experiences that are more ambitious, and we expect to have them ready soon.