Hey there Escapists!
Last week we had a blog on multiplayer systems - the super cool stuff that’ll help you get along with your teammate a little better - outlines, pings, and emotes! However, we wanted to dedicate a blog to go over the concept of multiplayer as a whole, how it’s shaping up for Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School, and some of what you can expect.
That’s okay. Luckily for you, we’ve got that handled. Check out our YouTube devlog on multiplayer!
Escape Academy 1’s multiplayer was exactly what you’d expect out of a co-op escape room experience: you could give your partner items, and they existed in the same space as you while you solved puzzles. This did its job well, as you wouldn’t be exploring larger areas, but during some playtests for Escape Academy 2, we realized that multiplayer needed some upgrades.
Escape Academy 1 taught us that playtesting is incredibly important. Just look at these internal documents I “borrowed” from our retrospective last year!While we were playtesting, we found a couple of issues with multiplayer that made it a little difficult for players to get the full experience out of an open-world game. But, we were missing something.
When it comes to Escape Academy 2, our pool of playtesters is much larger and we’re making sure to use this to our advantage. With the first game, we let it fall behind for the reasons listed above, and this led to some of our puzzles in the later portions of the game losing the consistency we built with the early portions of the game. You might not have even noticed this as a player, but to us as a studio, it was leagues of difference.
Consistent playtesting has led us to be a lot happier, and much more confident, when it comes to our puzzle/world design with Escape Academy 2. Now, whenever we’re making something, we try not to call it fun until we’ve seen another player have fun with it. And even then, we want to playtest it over and over again to make sure that what we’re seeing is genuine enjoyment out of puzzle lovers like us.
Playtesting has been a huge help for building out our open-world multiplayer.
A large campus brings large demands. Meet Player 1 and Player 2 - two of our playtesters here to help demonstrate how we came to the addition of the new multiplayer systems we introduced in our last blog.
Nice to meet you, Player 1 and Player 2! Let’s take a look at how your playtests went.
Player 1 is not the best when it comes to descriptive language - but Player 2 has the projector still that leads to one of the 3 answers needed for this puzzle. So, Player 1 says: ”I think you can put that projector still in that projector over there” But Player 2 is beyond lost. “Over where? I don’t see it!” Well, it’s certainly not on the ceiling.
Thanks to Player 2, Escape Academy now has pings for the first time ever.
Both players just finished an escape room. Great! But now they’re just standing there. Menacingly. Soullessly.
However, our brand-new WIP emotes system is bound to fix that and give Player 1 and Player 2 an outlet to let out some of that extra energy. Let’s celebrate!
Lastly, it’s easy to get lost in an open world campus. You might be able to meet up in a designated spot on campus, or just learn the map, but to us, being able to keep a close eye on your partner makes staying together a little bit easier. Now, no matter where you are, you can keep a close eye on your partner. Whether they know it or not.
Lastly, one of the biggest lessons we learned while making multiplayer, and subsequently playtesting the multiplayer experience, is that fun is subjective. I won’t go too deep into this here because it’s quite the lengthy topic and this blog is already quite tall, but if you want to see a talk on this, Gabe Newell has an excellent interview with a behavioural psychologist where he talks all about it.Regardless, playtesting has taught us a lot about what “fun” is, and as compared to Escape Academy 1, we’ve made a vow to ourselves to not call something fun until we’ve seen someone else have fun with it first.
Hopefully you’re excited for multiplayer too - but what you see here isn’t the end of the road for us. We want your suggestions! If you have anything on your “Escape Academy 2’s Multiplayer Wishlist”, please let us know in the comments and we’ll take a deeper look at it! If you’re excited about multiplayer too, make sure to let us know by putting us on your wishlist. And if you made it here, thank you for reading.
With love,Coin Crew Games💛💜