Week 1: Software & Electronics Team

The first escape room I played was in my hometown when I was sixteen. When I went through that escape room with my friends, I didn’t expect that I will build one as a school project one day.

There are over twenty students working for this project, including me. We are divided into six groups and they are set design, lobby design, electronics and software, house management and running crew, marketing and ticketing and production management. I am working as a member of electronics and software team along with five other students.

One of the responsibilities of software and electronics team is to help the set design and lobby design group to build the puzzles that involve software and electronic component. Most of us are familiar with either programming or electronic engineering so we can help them a lot on this kind of puzzles.

Another important task we need to do is to set up cameras in the escape room so that we would know what the players are doing. There have to be at least one monitor in the room to give the players hint as well. We also need to make sure that every camera and monitor is working properly and able to be controlled by a computer outside the escape room.

We went to meet the design group last Friday. They showed us some concept art for SCP games and it seems like our SCP-theme escape room is going to involve a lot of lights and other electronic component. The meeting was pretty productive, since we had a basic idea about what we are going to make after the meeting.

This week we created a slack work space for the whole class and each group created their own channel in the work space. Now everyone can discuss and report their work progress in the slack work space.

On Friday, we went to meet our instructor for the project, Dean, and checked out the items we already have. Those items are left by the group that worked on this project and built an escape room last year. We made a list of all those items and put it in our shared google drive so everyone has access to it. In the future, if anyone put anything in our inventory for the project, we will add it into the list as well. We will keep this list updated so that it will be easier for the group next year to figure out what they have in their inventory.

This weekend, we formed groups of two and created some basic design for puzzles. The puzzle designed by me and my partner requires plenty of electronic devices. In the class, I heard that a lot of puzzles that are designed by others would need software and electronic device as well. There is going to be a lot of work for us to do.

Next week, we will start to set up cameras and monitors in the escape room as well as helping the design team on building their puzzles.