Welcome to the very first entry in our Dev Diary series, where we take you behind the scenes of Escape Simulator 2 development. In these posts, we introduce new systems, tools, and features coming to the game. Today’s post is all about the new Room Editor.
It’s written by Filip, one of our programmers who’s been focused on improving the editor’s core functionality; from adding full 3D building support to streamlining workflows and making the entire creation process more flexible and intuitive.
Hey everyone! I’m Filip, a programmer at Pine, currently working on the new Room Editor for Escape Simulator 2. In this post, I’ll walk you through how we’ve improved the tools and workflows to help you build even more ambitious and creative escape rooms.
Escape Simulator is known for its endless supply of escape rooms, thanks largely to the built-in Room Editor that allowed the community to create thousands of amazing experiences.
Naturally, we want to make the process of creating rooms as easy, intuitive and enjoyable as possible, giving you the tools to build whatever you envision. Here are some of the major improvements we’ve made to world building.
Disclaimer: The user interface and features shown are work in progress and may change before the final release. What you see here does not represent the final quality or functionality of the game.
One of the most requested features for the original Escape Simulator editor was the ability to create walkable stairs, allowing players to move up and down in a space (for example, a house with multiple floors). However, due to limitations in the system for placing floors and walls, this just wasn’t possible.
Screenshot showing Escape Simulator 1 Room Editor.
While the ES1 building system was simple to use and easy to understand (which was great), it had several major limitations:
It only allowed floors to be placed on a single plane at Y = 0, locking the entire walkable area to one flat level.
Floors and walls were a separate system (not regular props), and once placed, they couldn’t be modified.
All floors and walls were always the same square shape, making it hard to create interesting terrain.
Creating a large area required placing many 1x1 floor tiles, which could be tedious.
Building far from the origin meant slowly clicking your way outward by placing more floors.
The ES2 editor solves all of these problems.
In ES2, floors and walls are no longer a separate system. Instead, they are regular props just like any other object you place, but with powerful editing tools that allow you to fully customize their shape and appearance. The old building system is completely gone. When you create a new room, it starts with a single floor and wall already in place.
Newly created room in ES2 editor.
This change alone (treating floors and walls as props) solves issues #1 and #2. You can now freely position the floor anywhere and modify its properties. Since floors can now be rotated and moved, you can create ramps and stairs, finally unlocking the vertical Y-axis for fully 3D walkable areas.
A simple ramp in ES2 Editor.
Actual, walkable and working stairs!
Although a floor may look like a simple prop, behind the scenes there’s a lot of complex math and procedural mesh generation happening, allowing you to modify the shape however you like. When you select a floor, you’ll see options to change its appearance, including textures. But the real power lies in the extrude options and the Edit button.
Floor properties that allow you to change appearance and shape.
Clicking Edit puts you into shape-editing mode. Here's what the default floor looks like when clicked:
White spheres/circles show all the points of the floor and blue lines show all of the edges.
You can drag points to reshape the floor, add points for more complexity, or remove points to simplify it.
Reshaping the floor in ES2 editor.
You can have as many points as you like and create virtually any shape. Even better, you can carve out holes and apply extrusion to turn it into a 3D shape.
Carving holes and applying extrusions to turn the floor into a 3D shape.
With this, we’ve solved:
Issue #3 (limiting floors to square shapes).
Issue #4 (tedious large-area creation, now it’s as simple as dragging a few points).
Issue #5 (building far from the origin), thanks to the new grid-based placement system.
Don’t worry if editing isn’t your thing. We’re also providing pre-made floors and walls you can simply drag and drop into your room.
As for ceilings: in 3D spaces, the concept of a ceiling becomes redundant (since a floor above is also the ceiling below), so it's now unified. Just place another floor above if you want a ceiling.
Everything described for floors also applies to walls: adding, editing or removing points, and applying extrusion. Under the hood, walls and floors are the same system, just rotated.
But there’s more. Walls support a carving system. Built on top of the hole-carving tech used for floors, it allows you to place props like doors and windows, and the wall will automatically carve a hole for them.
A brand-new carving system allowing you to easily add doors and windows.
Precise placement of props, floors and walls is crucial for the feel of a room. That’s why ES2 features a fully customizable grid system.
By default, each square is 1x1, but you can change this.
Any action involving positioning (like placing a prop or editing floor points) can snap to the grid.
You can also change the grid’s color, or disable it entirely if needed.
GIF showing a brand-new grid system in ES2 Editor.
In the ES1 editor, it was impossible to clearly see where the player could walk. If you placed an obstacle, you had to test it in play mode to find out whether it blocked the path.
With ES2’s more complex 3D spaces, this issue could have become even worse. That’s why we’ve added a walkable area visualizer in edit mode.
It helps you easily see:
Which areas are walkable.
Which are blocked by props.
Whether a passage is too low, and more.
Here is what it looks like in action:
Room without walkable area visualization.
Room with walkable area visualisation (blue area shows exactly where the player can walk in-game).
That's it for now. We can’t wait to see what you’ll create with all the new tools we’ve built! The world of Escape Simulator 2 just got a whole lot bigger, and a whole lot more vertical!