Today, we’ll be discussing the economy. Not the one as you and I know it, but rather, the in-game economy for our upcoming title: Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School!
As you may already know, Escape Bucks are prevalent around campus as the dominant currency - and if you’ve played the demo, you may have even picked up a few already.
Now made with real paper!
Escape bucks are the first collectibles you’ll be able to pick up as you go around campus, and they serve as a crucial part of the main economy of the game. Escape Bucks can be used to buy critical quest items, such as books for your classes or [ERROR]!
We believe that Escape Bucks will be a super fun mechanic that’ll take you into spaces you wouldn’t expect, and have you exploring unordinary places to make sure you’re cramming your wallet with every Escape Buck you can find 😉
Whenever we were minting the first Escape Bucks to pass around the Academy, we thought we’d try invisible ink at first. However, that went exactly as you’d expect:
Womp womp. It's a little hard to read the denomination without your UV light handy.
Escape Bucks are going to be for more than just moving along the story - and there’s something very exciting you’ll be able to buy that we’ll be going over in our next steam blog👀 From a developer standpoint, Escape Bucks are a crucial tool we’ve been using to properly pace content. That’s to say that Extra Credit Quests will be semi-mandatory, allowing you to pick and choose the method you acquire funds to progress the story, giving every playthrough a more unique experience than if it were entirely optional. More on that in a future blog post! When it comes to purchasable content in the game, we’d definitely love to hear the community’s ideas on what they expect their Escape Dollar to be able to do. However, Escape Bucks won’t be your only way to reach financial independence at the Academy, as we’ve got another currency up our sleeve…
If you’ve played Escape Academy, you’ll know that the Red Herring is a rather treasured creature of ours. It’s a fun way to tell a player they’ve missed the mark, or even to just tease them through the mind-play of insinuating you may have gotten something wrong. However this time, there’s no tricks, as we’ll be hiding a bunch of these bad boys everywhere around campus:
We may not be a massive team, but we are a team of 10 little deviants and we love hiding secrets around campus. We’re still in the process of designing exactly how Red Herrings are going to be used and what their purpose will be, but we’re always looking for opportunities to hide little pockets of (fishy) flavor into the game, and Red Herrings are one of many tools with which we’ll be doing so.
I didn’t go over school credits in this blog as I feel like the game design/economy of school credits alone is its own thing that we could dedicate an entire blog to - however, if you’d like to hear more about them, let us know! We’re super excited about how the collectibles economy is shaping up in Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School, but we want to know your thoughts too! Where do you think your Escape Bucks should go? Let us know in the comments! That’s all for now. As always, don’t forget to…
Stay Escape-y,
Coin Crew Games💛💜