CT4105 - Escape Room  Mohammed Sumani & Ted Arnott 

With the initial thoughts of the escape room game we decided to have it themed around a diner as we thought the scenery of a old school would give way to alot of fun and spooky ideas, Mohammed  came up with a few designs of tables and middle areas that a classical diner could have. Below you can see the models and type of style Mohammed was looking for. 

We then thought it would be a good idea to get a list of requirements or even a few story ideas to empore the creativity and complement the overall theme

After That we decided we needed some inspiration as neither of us had been inside a classical diner from the 80s and so on. we collected an amount of images and based our room placement and overall style on these images.

This is the first room in our escape room in unity, it is a storage room with boxes, shelves, and a door. The door is locked and the player can look, open, or close the door. I got this setup with the UI on the camera shown on the image above which has action buttons. The box labeled important box can then be inspected, this transitions to the minigame tilt puzzle shown below. There are camera transitions in this scene to the door, the box, and the shelf. The key is needed to open the door and can be clicked on to collect. 

The tilt puzzle was fairly easy to setup, however getting it to work and play, gave us a few problems. We had issues with the scripts as the balls would collide and not go to the next level as intended. The fix for this was making sure all the names in my project were the same as in the script. To realise this I posted in the UOG creative computing discord for help understanding the errors I was being given, and I received great help on this.  

For our character level we wanted to use a different character to the one given, as it wouldn't make any sense in our game. We had the idea to have a mouse in the kitchen, makes sense with it being seemingly abandoned. I downloaded the FBXs for this character, with an idle animation, a running animation, and a jump animation. Getting this setup took a while as making all the transitions in the animator got confusing and I got mixed up. I used the example escape room provided to match mine up with the one in there to make sure the order was correct as the jump animation wouldn't play from running.

We used the assets from our kitchen scene to make this level, the idea is to get to the cheese at the end to progress through the game. I made my own script to detect the collision of the character and the cheese to load the next level. We animated these obstacles to get past to make it more challenging. The cheese is also animated to float up and down. The character is fully setup with the correct animations playing to the correct inputs.

The level above is the kitchen level. We tried to make the combination lock for this game and would place the numbers around the room for the player to put in. However we had many issues getting it to work, and when we had an almost working version we had to move it into the main project which caused many errors. In the end we couldn't fix it because of the amount of different errors that were confusing to us. Instead the door is locked and you pick up the key to unlock the door. 

If we had more time there would have been another puzzle in this room, but we really struggled to create the puzzles in unity. We also didn't use github due to not being able to set it up and we didn't want to risk messing things up with only a few weeks left to go. If we did this again we would setup github and learn it fully at the start of the project.

The final room is the diner room which is made using probuilder models. Unfortunately we didn't have time to get a working puzzle for this room. To make up for this we tried to add a twist ending. The door in this room looks very mysterious and is locked. When you investigate a message says 'You feel dizzy...' and then it transitions to a bedroom scene saying it was all a dream. Because it is a video game approach to escape rooms, and a short project, we felt it was a suitable ending rather than just leaving the diner.

This was the animator for the camera showing all our transitions to objects or new rooms.