Marble Puzzle Design (pre escape room phase)
This is the design file of a marble puzzle in an Escape Room
Concept Sketch
Playtest Summary
Player Profile
Jes is a university student and she had played escape rooms before. She has good math and logic preexposure and understands some mechanics of escape room puzzles.
Prior Information Provided Before Playtest
She was told to be in an old library room with a table in the middle of the room; you found several letters on the table with some random papers and a plume pen. Not far away on the side bookshelf, there is a stream of light on a crystal small chest with a lock of 3-digit passcode.
What Happened During the Test
She first opened each envelope and took out the marbles, placed them next to each envelope. Then she looked at the stamp on each envelope and flipped it over to see if there were something on the back. After that, she focused on the chest with the passcode and saw there were marble illustrations next to each digit of the passcode that she found similar to the marble inside each envelope, so she asked me to affirm if the price on the stamp is the key to the passcode.
After having the affirmative response, she began to calculate the value of each marble. She wrote down the value on the scratch paper of each marble and successfully figured out the correct answer (ruby = 2; green = 1; yellow = 8) and then typed those answers into the chest. The puzzle was successfully completed.
Player Feedback
She thought the puzzle was too easy for her; she mentioned if there could be more challenges would be better
The cost of each stamp should be the key to the answer, so there should be less noise in the letter (she mean those addresses I wrote on each envelope which I later removed)
Letters should be more randomly stacked on the table while the order should not matter to distract the players
Reflection
How did the Process Go
The building of this puzzle is relatively easy because there are only three envelopes to do with origami. The more difficult part comes when I wanted to lookup for some stamps, most of the stamps in history are pretty illustrative and low-resolution, so I may think people can hardly see the price of each stamp. At last, I added a script to indicate the price in black and white to emphasize more the value of each stamp (to hint to them the core to solve it is those prices!)
Were there challenges caused by being a paper prototype versus a physical one
The light is hard to present as a paper prototype
The marble should be shinier and more precious than only using plain paper. The real object should be more engaging and hint to them they have some value corresponding to the value of the stamps
Paper are more vulnerable for multiple uses; if more times people open and close the envelope, it could fall apart.
What improvements or changes would you make if you were to continue this puzzle and why?
Based on the players, I could modify the difficulty of the puzzle to make it neither tedious nor frustrating
I could use better marbles that have some actual weight to engage the players
I could make the letter more realistic in material (e.g. use parchment papers, add grass ropes to make it more like a package)
About how to make better connection between the marble inside and the value of the stamp outside (maybe a better marble, add small hint inside the envelope?)
评论
发表评论