Digital escape room prototype

This game started as a passion project, something to work on in my free time that would demonstrate to IBM stakeholders how a video game could be used in their internal education courses. It became a functioning proof-of-concept that was pitched and funded for development before I left the company. From what I’ve heard, I left the game in good hands because it has successfully launched in some of their European courses.

The design of this “Escape Room” focused on putting those students into a situation that would force them to work together as a team for 10-15 minutes solving puzzles. These puzzles were crafted to draw out communication difficulties between different cultures and languages, a common occurrence in a company as large as IBM. Then after playing the game the facilitator would launch into a workshop around teamwork and communication. The participants now have a recent shared experience they can draw on while discussing the course material.

As this project was not initially funded, my programmer and I needed to reduce the development time required to get to a fully functioning proof-of-concept. Part of our solution was to use primitive objects and materials native to the Unity game engine to build the environment. This meant we didn’t need to spend any time modeling, texturing, or exporting; which allowed us to throw together a small environment in a couple hours.

One of the main points of push back we received from stakeholders when pitching video games as an addition to training courses was the long development process. Part of the focus of this prototype was to show that it was completely possible to create a game with little resources and time but still fulfill the intended objective of the course and exercises.