The Potential of Escape Rooms: Location

When we started designing our first Lock Chicago escape room, we asked ourselves, "What is an Escape Game, and what are its restrictions?" One of the biggest considerations for an Escape room is of course the room itself. Most commonly, the space is a room in a building (usually an office or something similar) that's been revamped and redesigned to hold an escape room in it, but that is in no way the only way to have an escape room.

Giant Escape Rooms

There is a myth (/truth) that in Japan, the chain Escape Rooms (which is where all escape rooms started) actually plan out special escape room events that go beyond their actual rooms. I'm not sure how often they do these, but every now and again they will rent out a giant warehouse and prepare it to hold 1000 people for a HUGE mass escape room event. Now I've never done one, nor can I imagine how they would run an escape room on that scale successfully, but it completely breaks the restraints that having a confined space puts on your every day escape room. Granted you're still in a 'confined space', but it's a warehouse.

Teeny Tiny Escape Rooms

 Now this option is much more doable for the average escape room owner, and one that we at Lock Chicago plan on taking full advantage of once the weather gets warmer and the city festivals start coming out. Escape rooms usually last an hour, but there's nothing that says that's how long they absolutely HAVE to be. An hour is the absolute sweet spot, of course (and if you want to read more on that then take a look at this), but if you make the room smaller, you can easily design something that players can have fun trying to solve in 15-20 minutes. This is where the idea of the fair-ground escape game comes into play.

At a local festival or block party, a simple escape room can be easily (and cheaply) popped up with a simple canvas tent and some furniture. By making the time limit 15-30 minutes instead of an hour and dropping the price of entrance per customer, you can make a great activity for guests and festival-goers. This also allows younger children to participate, as escape rooms are usually made for the 16+ demographic. Easy to reset and easy to run, these one-day escape rooms bring the game to a much wider audience in a much friendlier and casual environment, and should be considered by any escape-game owners looking to get more involved with their communities.

While we're just getting our start, we here at Lock Chicago are always thinking of ways to expand our escape rooms beyond the room itself, and beyond 'escaping', too. This not only opens us up to more creative avenues of provision, but it also makes our games in the actual space more creative, too. The more you do, the more you do. That's as simple as it gets.

Designing an Escape Room: Custom Puzzles

If you're looking for a project that'll put your hands to work, build an Escape Room. Or become a construction worker, but we think Escape Rooms are more fun. Especially because you're building the project for yourself (one of the perks of owning your own business). But as you build your puzzle space, you'll realize very quickly that IKEA, Amazon, and thrift shops don't actually sell the furniture/fixtures/objects you need to make your ideas come to life. The majority of your room will have at least some kind of custom flair to it, but that's where the learning curve really kicks in.

Expenses Beget Learning

At Lock Chicago, we pride ourselves on creating unique puzzles that have you interacting with objects you wouldn't normally find in your day-to-day lives. That means a lot of custom work for us. Fortunately for us, custom usually means expensive.

Did we just say 'fortunately'? Yes we did, and here's why: when something is expensive, you get very resourceful very quickly when it comes to cutting costs. We have a lot of pieces that require a significant amount of precision to work (reflecting lasers around the room isn't as easy as you think!), and one of those custom pieces had to be as precise as precise can get. We're talking angles and geometry and trigonometry and all that stuff you swore you'd never try again once you left high school. We're crafty, but there's no way we could make what we needed successfully by hand in the time that we had, so we asked ourselves 'what is the most precise way to build these pieces in one go?' And that's how we landed on 3D printing.

The Design Phase

Once we figure out how to add pictures to these blogs we will, but here would have been a grand time to add a few. We have a whole design drawer here at Lock Chicago (and you might even see a few of those designs hanging on the walls in our lobby). And while custom crafting services will design the piece you need for you, we prefer to do it ourselves so we got onto a free 3D design site called TinkerCAD. Incredibly easy and a lot of fun if you're into that sort of thing. We went through four or five revisions of these designs before we settled on a finished product and sent them out to 3D printing shops. Unfortunately for us, we found out that printing all of the pieces we needed this way would cost us several thousand dollars. Back to square one...

Libraries are Treasures Hidden in Plain Sight

...Or so we thought. We found out that although it would cost a small fortune to go through a 3D printing service, the Harold Washington Library here in Chicago actually has a Maker's Lab on the 3rd floor that lets you use 3D printers for free (as long as you pay $.50 for every half hour of printing time you use). Pennies! We had struck gold! Unfortunately... it would take about 17 hours to print one of these custom pieces and we needed 10 of them. 170 * $.50 per half hour comes out to a lot less than several thousand dollars, but it was no longer an option given our ambitions here at Lock Chicago. Still! Go to your local library and get to know what they offer! You'll be surprised by everything you can find-- we know we were!

Networking!

Not only do libraries have cool labs like this, but the people who work there are incredibly knowledgeable, and are in fact the greatest resource that library can offer you. We met Will Garza at the Maker's Lab and he helped us out with the 3D printing. When our plans for 3D printing failed, he knew alternatives we hadn't even thought of that would get us the same precision 3D printing would give us, and for far cheaper. Turns out he's the co-owner of White Knight Services, a custom crafting company, and we would end up using his services for all of the custom work you'll see at Lock Chicago. Finally, after a long journey, we had our custom pieces and could get started on the room.

The Lock Chicago moral of this story: just keep pushing. The more you do towards something, the more ways you learn how to do what needs to be done even better. From idea to design to 3D printing to expensive printers to helpful libraries, all added up to us finding not only the best way to create our custom pieces, but also created a relationship that will help us out for years to come. Like we said earlier, expenses beget knowledge, especially when it comes to Escape Rooms.

Designing an Escape Room: The Idea

Everything starts with a small idea (or in the case of a Snuggie, someone accidentally putting a bathrobe on backwards) and the Escape Rooms here at Lock Chicago are no different. It all starts off with the most granular element of the puzzle, and the rest develops as you realize what you can accomplish with that mechanic. Take a look at our Sunburn room, for example. The underlying mechanic for the room is "light" and interesting ways to play around with it, especially redirection (if anyone here has seen The Mummy you know what I'm talking about). Every puzzle that exists in that room involves that mechanic.

An Expert Opinion

For those of you who follow this sort of thing, Johnathan Blow is releasing The Witness on January 26th, a puzzle game for computers and consoles. Johnathan Blow is considered one of the greatest video game puzzle makers around, and in this interview he states that the 600+ puzzles that exist to be solved in the game all have, on their most granular level, the same mechanic running through them: connecting two dots with a line.

Connecting the Dots

That's right, the some 100 hours of playtime it would take to fully beat his upcoming game are spent essentially just connecting dots, but once you see the screenshots and videos of the game you can immediately tell that it's a gross over-simplification. The important thing to take away from this is that the entire concept, and the project he and his team have spent close to 10 years now working on, started with an idea as small as connecting two dots with a single line. All great ideas stem from a granular foundation, and that concept has been generalized into the term we know today as "theme". What is the theme of your Escape Room, and how will you abstract it?

Tackling a project can be daunting when you look at it as a whole. When building a house, don't think of the house--think of the foundation you have to lay first, then the wood skeleton, then the insulation, then the exterior, then the interior, and then the finishing touches. Designing (and not to mention building) an Escape Room is done the same way, and that's how we do it at Lock Chicago. If you're looking to get some help starting a room, or are just curious to learn more, feel free to reach out to us at info@lockedchicago.com and we'll give you all of the advice we can.

 

Starting Lock Chicago Escape Rooms

You know usually you should start a post titled "Starting Lock Chicago Escape Rooms" when you actually start the business, but we're just a few months off. Besides, with a touch of retrospect we can guarantee this post will be a lot more interesting than it would have been if we had written it three months ago. For starters, we're not starting off with 'This is our first post, we're so excited to start our business!' Trust us, we're still VERY excited (and we hope it shows in our rooms) but we know the lay of the land a bit better now and take everything with a level head, an even keel, and more than the appropriate amount of stability cliches.

Three Months Ago

Three months ago our lives were phone calls and emails. We had nothing: no website, no legal status, and we hadn't even mapped out our first room yet. All we had was the encouragement of a few friends over at Locked Manhattan and the help of the folks over at SCORE and the Chicago BACP. Talking about and designing an Escape Room is a ton of fun, and it gets the brain working, but complying with federal, state, and city codes, laws, zoning, and licensing is a... let's call it a 'learning experience'. There is a learning curve and there are a lot of lessons, which we'll cover in these blogs, and we hope you learn a little something from them, if not find them interesting. Hopefully if you're starting your own Escape Room, our experiences will help you avoid some of the pits we had to climb out of on our way to the grand opening of Lock Chicago.

Today

It's  roughly three weeks before the opening of our first Escape Room here at Lock Chicago (use coupon code GRANDOPENING at checkout for 10% off for a limited time #shamelessplug), and we're deep into beta testing and ironing out our designs. There are few things more powerful than seeing something as personal as your puzzle design (which is your own personal challenge to the world) slowly manifest from idea to physical space. Everything we've done up until now has been absolutely worth it, and we can't wait for our first customers to come give the finished puzzle a go. But we'll go into more detail on that in some later posts.

For now, we're hard at work making our puzzle room as unique and memorable as it can possibly be, and we hope you come check us out.

Bane and Brian