Scene Stealer
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Get That Gold!
Get That Gold!
Scene Stealer was an escape room hosted March 20th, 2024 at the UC Santa Cruz Silicon Valley Extension Campus. It was built by 21 developers over the course of 9 weeks. In it players are instructed to act for a heist movie in a suspiciously elaborate set. The entire escape room's tone is comedic, with hyperbolic situations and characters used constantly.
As a Puzzle Designer, Kate's goal was to contribute to the aesthetic of the room while incorporating into other puzzles, her responsibilities included:
Designing the disc rotation puzzle (3:10)
Fabricating the disc rotation puzzle
Communicating with poster puzzle team to place puzzle solution (2:30)
Facilitated room for players
She also did programming in Processing for the project, including:
Programming the Countdown clock
Programmed handling of light sensor input
Programmed video queue handler
Puzzle Development
The puzzle design started with the idea of a blackout password to the next puzzle. She settled on a disc and dvd container as it was a thematic way to incorporate the puzzle type.
The puzzles design was done backwards, with the password being decided, then the text on the disc being designed to include the password in a vertical orientation. A grid layout was established when lettering the disc so that when the cases were designed, we had a preset cutting lines for both the actual case and red herring cases.
Initially, the only clue which case was the right one was the poster for the correct movie case having awards text matching the disc. Players would inconsistently notice this however, so Kate added a second hint. She modified the hint pointing towards the DVD player, so that it was located on the poster corresponding to the correct case. Once this was implemented, players were much more consistent in being able to eventually figure out the right case.
Players would often still put the disc in at weird angles or try to spin it to find the answer, and sadly Kate was unable to implement a design fix to make that clearer before the escape room went live
Clock Development
Kate programmed the clock over a couple days in Processing. It has a basic minute second display starting at 45 minutes. She made a pause, play and reset button, automated cues to pull up lock symbols when a light sensor goes off, video playback which starts when the timer starts and when the safe light sensor receives feedback.
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