Developing replayable, live-action adventures

The Story Room concept bridged from the initial emergence of escape rooms - hour long, themed puzzle games to find your way out of a locked room - but with a key difference: let guests instead play a role in a live-action story. By centering the experience on a story, the focus instead became on progressing a narrative over racing through puzzles to get out in time.

Over a series of piloted iterations, we experimented with various aspects of form and came up with in-world design solutions to keep the narrative in tact. How can we give hints without breaking the fourth wall? A helpful AI character and text-to-speech came in handy. How do we design games and puzzles that require active collaboration? Dividing up information from input or splitting tasks into varied, spread out stations worked well. And how do we get guests to come back and play a room again? Looking to episodic formats - like a space crew sent on various missions - could allow one single set to hold multiple stories for groups to come back and play a new experience with low reinvestment. By looking at the type of story we wanted to tell and experience we wanted for the guests, the design decisions we experimented with followed naturally to deliver that experience.

The latest iteration of Space Squad in Space and other Story Rooms can be played at Two Bit Circus in Downtown LA.

Company: Two Bit Circus
Role: Producer and Product Lead