Welcome back, Escapists!
We’re here again this week with another devlog, this time digging deeper at some stuff from behind the scenes - despite some sneak peeks at our quests system here and some short-form content there, you might catch yourself wondering:
Let’s go back. Waaaay back. Our studio, Coin Crew Games, was founded in 2018 with one simple goal in mind: to bring people together through play. It started with arcade cabinets, and over time as we grew as a team, we started to branch out with some other goals in mind. With the ongoing pandemic in 2020, we were led to Escape Academy’s conception - our first full-fledged puzzle video game that could be played by anyone, anywhere, in your own home.
Staring at the Steam store, our co-founder Wyatt recounts: “…We didn't see any local co-op escape room games on the store pages. As a team, we love local co-op games like Towerfall, Speedrunners, and Overcooked are all games that we really enjoy playing, so there not being a solid escape room version felt like a gap in the market.” It was a daunting project, and the co-op elements meant you could play with your friends and family from a distance. Given that arcade games were supposed to last a few minutes before being replayed, which was challenging enough to make, a gameplay experience for Escape Academy that would last 4-6 hours was an exciting and intimidating task.
Over the next couple years, we would put thousands of hours into the creation of Escape Academy. After mountains of effort and learning, we could finally put down our pencils and say that it was finished. However, at this point it was time to take our vision a step further.
Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School has been in development for nearly a year now. In that time we’ve been using all the lessons that Escape Academy 1 gave us - one of the most important of those lessons being that we made just about every mistake you can make in the design of our original game engine.
Given our ambitions going into the sequel, and wanting to avoid inheriting the bugs from the first engine, we had to make a difficult decision. That’s why before we could even get started with 2, it was time to burn down the first engine and start completely over. So, we were here:
It was a blessing and a curse, in many different ways. Starting over meant, well, starting from nothing. But starting over also meant we could use those lessons we learned from the first game to build bigger and even better.
Escape Academy 2 started as two pictures:
It would be an open world experience where you could talk to NPCs and be taken through quests and puzzle rooms while exploring a whimsical academy that teaches the art of escape. It evolved to a collection of questions, that went something like this:
How do we make a sequel?
We know that we don’t want Escape Academy 1.5. We want Escape Academy 2. A sequel shouldn’t feel like a bunch of extra level packs, but rather be a completely transformative take on the world of Escape Academy.
Is this possible?
There’s open-world games, and there’s escape room games. But this time, we’re doing both - how does one accomplish that?
How do open-world mechanics change a puzzle game?
How can we learn from the mistakes we made in the past?
Don’t let these questions fool you - every answer would have a counterargument, and every point has its own counterpoint. Plenty of ideas would be thrown around, some kept, some scrapped, and we watched as the world of Escape Academy itself evolved with our ideas.
Now, it was time to begin prototyping.
The first (and completely, totally sane) version of our game looked something like this:
We had this idea for a first escape room where you have to escape from detention, and so we assembled a super basic test environment that allowed us to see what that might be like. We were pretty much trying to get an idea of how our new engine was working, because in these early stages there’s always bugs and problems you need to look out for. In these polished devlogs, you don’t always get to see the trials and tribulations that game development really can be - but trust me - the team has had our fair share of late night troubleshooting, even back then.
This also happened to be the point in our development process where we introduced the quests system - If you’ve read our last blog post (which you definitely should, by the way) you’ll notice it looks a lot different here!
Now that we’d nailed down a prototype and had our game engine in a spot we were happy with, we could start thinking about what an open-world escape room experience would truly look like.
3 weeks of combined engineering, design, narrative, and art efforts led us here! This is one of the earliest stages of the campus you’ll see, and this foundation was a glorious first step.
Past this point, we started to think of the first areas that could be interesting to design escape rooms in, especially now that we could start visualizing how quests would function - maybe you run from that tower overlooking everything to the dome over on the right. We set our sights on Humanities - the section of the Academy where you’d learn about the history and culture of Escape.
This area was incredibly impactful to the team, because we were finally getting into the big chunks of open-world gameplay that players would experience. We designed our first big puzzles for Escape Academy 2 here, and if you’ve seen our viral Aztec Lock video, this area will end up being very familiar👀
The Humanities area also marked the point where research began to play a major part in our process. When designing puzzles, we would often find ourselves miles-deep in research rabbitholes trying to find interesting ways to tie puzzles in to other cultures, and fun ways to tie the Escape Academy lore/history into our puzzles as well. It was a very educational process for the entire team, especially because we were getting back into the swing of things with game development after Escape Academy. Humanities got to stretch beyond just a campus area - it became a massive milestone marker of what our hard work had become!
I don’t think I remember Escape Bucks looking like that…
At this time in our development process, we began to swap between escape room design and open-world design because often times, an escape room would demand something from our open-world environment or vice versa. Sometimes we’d go back and change things because narrative would change, or maybe something wouldn’t play how we wanted. Months and months of work later, our process would lead us here: we created the Headmaster’s Tower as you know it, in all its glory!
Don’t let these quick snapshots into our development process make you think it was easy - game design is hard, and what you’re seeing is nearly a year of combined efforts from a team of around ten people. We’re incredibly grateful for those of you who have been following us, because keeping this exciting project secret for almost a year was not easy.
Next week, we plan to dive a little deeper into all of this on our YouTube channel and really give you a thorough look at what the timeline up to Humanities was like for us - but we hope this teaser has satiated your curiosity for now😉
What are you dying to know in the development process? When it comes to these devlogs, what speaks most to you? Let us know in the comments!
And as always, don’t forget to:
and we’ll see you in the next one.
With Love,
Coin Crew Games💛💜