Uploaded January 2018 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Here's the second part of my video diary documenting the creation of an Escape Room puzzle for the Global Game Jam 2018.
The theme for this year's jam was announced as "TRANSMISSION".
I considered different possible intepretations of that - radio transmission, data transmission, and then came up with the idea of transmission of mechanical energy between cogs in a machine - a satisyingly tactile puzzle design, and not unfamiliar to escape rooms. Those cogs could be arranged in different ways to create different paths through the machine which, in turn, could be used as different ciphers wheels to encode/decode messages.
Because the cogs are lightweight (as mentioned in the last video, I'm following the "Cardboard Assets" diversifier!), they can be included in letters sent between characters (the "Epistolary" diversifier). When assembled using the cogs sent by a particular character, the idea is that the message would be decoded to reveal a different answer representing that character's point of view.
To set up a basic conflict between the characters' narratives, I chose to use a scientist and an artist and the combination of the mechanical nature of the machine and the communication through letters suggested that these should be from the Victorian era.
Here's the second part of my video diary documenting the creation of an Escape Room puzzle for the Global Game Jam 2018.
The theme for this year's jam was announced as "TRANSMISSION".
I considered different possible intepretations of that - radio transmission, data transmission, and then came up with the idea of transmission of mechanical energy between cogs in a machine - a satisyingly tactile puzzle design, and not unfamiliar to escape rooms. Those cogs could be arranged in different ways to create different paths through the machine which, in turn, could be used as different ciphers wheels to encode/decode messages.
Because the cogs are lightweight (as mentioned in the last video, I'm following the "Cardboard Assets" diversifier!), they can be included in letters sent between characters (the "Epistolary" diversifier). When assembled using the cogs sent by a particular character, the idea is that the message would be decoded to reveal a different answer representing that character's point of view.
To set up a basic conflict between the characters' narratives, I chose to use a scientist and an artist and the combination of the mechanical nature of the machine and the communication through letters suggested that these should be from the Victorian era.
