Georgia Tech Theme Park and Engineering Design Club 2024 Escape Room

Challenge: Designing an escape room that provides a fresh experience with every visit.

Solution: Developed puzzles with multiple solutions, ensuring that returning guests encounter new challenges and can approach the adventure from different perspectives, making each playthrough feel like a brand-new experience.

Process:

Concept Development: Chose a Space Pirate / Bounty Hunter theme and create an engaging story with character outlines.
Puzzle Design & Development: Designed puzzles, created detailed documentation, and developed key interactive elements:
- Token Puzzle: Vectorized token designs, engraved and cut them using an OMTech Laser Cutter.
- Ball Maze Puzzle: Modeled maze components and solutions in SolidWorks, laser-cut and assembled the maze
Immersive Elements: Created a digital ancient research notebook to help guests decipher the Zabtarian alphabet and token-based codes.
Fabrication & Assembly: Installed puzzles and props to transform rooms into an ancient temple and extraterrestrial spaceship.
Testing & Implementation: Iterated on puzzle designs, tested the escape room layout, and successfully installed the experience in the student center for guests to enjoy.

Concept Development

Storyline for room 1: You and your fellow crew of bounty hunters are looking for the power core, which is an ancient relic worth a lot of credits. You have discovered the temple in which the power core is located; however, there is only one problem. The Zebtarians have hidden and protected the power core. You and your crew must use clues left by the explorers before you to solve puzzles and unlock the power core. You must move quickly because your crew is not the only crew of bounty hunters looking for the power core.

Storyline for room 2: Congratulations! You have found the power core and successfully escaped the temple before the other bounty hunter crew could reach you. Now you are faced with a new problem. How do you get off the planet? You unfortunately crashed your ship upon arrival, and it is not fixable. The other bounty hunter’s ship seems to be fine. You quickly board the ship but realize the ship has been scavenged. Your crew must solve the puzzles as quickly as possible to fix the ship before the other bounty hunter crew realizes what you are doing.

Puzzle Design and Development

Token Puzzle

Overview:
Guests will discover an old research notebook filled with notes and papers from past explorers. This notebook provides subtle hints about the correct order in which six hidden tokens must be placed to unlock a combination lock.

To solve the puzzle, players must:

Find all six tokens hidden throughout the escape room.
Decipher the runic numbers engraved on each token.
Analyze the research notebook to determine the correct order for placing the tokens.
Multiply the correct numbers together to obtain the final combination.

Successfully unlocking the combination lock grants players one of the essential keys needed to solve the final puzzle of the first room.

Flow Chart:

Find research journal and token 1→ find token 2 → find token 3 → find token 4 → find token 5 → find token 6 → Decipher numbers on tokens → put the tokens in the correct order → multiply the correct tokens together → unlock combination lock

Ball Maze Puzzle

Overview:
Guests must navigate multiple balls through a maze, carefully guiding them to an exit hole located on one of the side walls. Once the balls are successfully removed from the maze, they can be opened to reveal a code to lock located somewhere else in the room, which is crucial for solving the final puzzle of the 1st room and completing their adventure.