Week 1: Writing and Lobby Design Team
It's escape room season at Worcester Polytech for the third time. After two years of being a playtester for these rooms, I'm finally on the other side of the table. We're on an incredibly tight time schedule to get this room put together. But we have over twenty pairs of hands to help. The hardest part of any project is figuring out how and where to start.
Most of the other groups that we've been organized into (Set Design, Marketing & Ticketing, Software & Electronics, House Management & Running Crew, and Production Management) depend on our team, the writing team, to flesh out an outline of the story. Our inspiration for this room comes from the SCP Foundation. This foundation is a fictional entity which secures and contains supernatural anomalies, whether they be living beings or inanimate objects, for the good of society. The SCP Wikipedia has thousands of articles on different anomalies and their effects on individual people or communities. It's rife with source material to incorporate into our escape room.
We determined that the best way to decide on a story was for each member of the writing team to develop a bullet-point level outline of the story. Then, when we had our weekly meeting, we would share these outlines and either select one or merge the best pieces of each together. In addition to these outlines, we scoured the internet for reference images, to give visual context for the scenarios that we were constructing.
It's important to keep in mind that we don't want to explicitly rip material from the SCP Wikipedia. While we are heavily inspired by the concept of SCP, we do not want to copy it or include the acronym "SCP" anywhere in our escape room or any of its promotional materials. For obvious copyright reasons but also for two other reasons. The first being that we just want to do our own thing that's fresh and new. The second being that future players of our escape room may not be familiar with SCP. If it's branded under that acronym we run the risk of making it conceptually inaccessible. I think that the next biggest hurdle for the writing team is to brainstorm names for the escape room. Titles are... So Hard.
-Leo Bunyea from the Writing and Lobby Design Team
Most of the other groups that we've been organized into (Set Design, Marketing & Ticketing, Software & Electronics, House Management & Running Crew, and Production Management) depend on our team, the writing team, to flesh out an outline of the story. Our inspiration for this room comes from the SCP Foundation. This foundation is a fictional entity which secures and contains supernatural anomalies, whether they be living beings or inanimate objects, for the good of society. The SCP Wikipedia has thousands of articles on different anomalies and their effects on individual people or communities. It's rife with source material to incorporate into our escape room.
Reference Image from the SCP video game
Reference image from deviant art
When the writing team came together with the build team on Wednesday, we eventually decided on a general narrative. The escape room participants are Class "D" personnel who essentially are maintenance workers responsible for all the jobs that no one else wants to do. One day they are tasked to go to a specific containment chamber. This chamber houses an anomalous, shape shifting creature whose one motivation is to terrorize people. It's also so gullible and full of itself that it will believe it has scared people if they simply act scared. The design of this creature is inspired by SCP-2006. The escape room participants are led down to this containment chamber by another supposed employee of a higher rank. This employee is actually the creature is disguise who has escaped its cell. After the participants are locked in the room, the employees dubious identity is revealed over an intercom. The creature threatens the participants' lives, leaving only 30 minutes for these "D" class personnel to figure out how to escape.
It's important to keep in mind that we don't want to explicitly rip material from the SCP Wikipedia. While we are heavily inspired by the concept of SCP, we do not want to copy it or include the acronym "SCP" anywhere in our escape room or any of its promotional materials. For obvious copyright reasons but also for two other reasons. The first being that we just want to do our own thing that's fresh and new. The second being that future players of our escape room may not be familiar with SCP. If it's branded under that acronym we run the risk of making it conceptually inaccessible. I think that the next biggest hurdle for the writing team is to brainstorm names for the escape room. Titles are... So Hard.
-Leo Bunyea from the Writing and Lobby Design Team
One big question for story to explain:
ReplyDeleteWhy puzzles?
Suggestions:
Like vampires who must count spilled rice/sticks, the entity is bound to provide an escape for its victims, but it has made it as hard to escape as possible.
The puzzles are to reactivate the containment system, and they're difficult so the entity can't get out. Class A people have the solutions all memorized, but they're all dead so it's up to the Class D crew.
The puzzles are less puzzles and more locks that contain the entity, and only once the entity is contained will the lockdown be lifted and the players can leave.
Something else?