Rice Hall Escape

Inspiration

We were inspired by the scavenger hunt throughout Rice Hall arranged by GWC board and our shared love for escape rooms when designing our project. When ideating, we wanted to combine elements of influential women in STEM, horror or erie vibes, and then puzzle games, and ultimately decided upon implementing this in Roblox Studio.

What it does

We designed a game in Roblox Studio that takes a player throughout Rice Hall, starting on the Fifth floor and having them solve puzzles through each floor to get down to the following level one at a time. Once the player makes it through all floors, they’ll get a reward!

How we built it

We knew we wanted a game, so our main two ideas from the start were Minecraft or Roblox, and we figured that Roblox would have easier implementation with what all we wanted for our vision. We used Roblox Studio for our entire project as well as Scripting in Lua. We first found the floor plans of Rice Hall and recreated that in a flat terrain in a new Roblox game project. While some worked on the construction of the building – functioning doors, elevators locked with keycodes, tables, chairs, etc, others worked on implementing the escape room puzzles on each floors.

Challenges we ran into

A lot of the challenges came with the cut-scene implementation at the beginning of the game. This more so provided the story behind the overall game where a player is in their room and is contacted by a CS professor to meet at the top of Rice Hall for an urgent matter. From this cut, we would jump to the player then being at the fifth floor of Rice Hall where lights would flicker and everything essentially is ‘shut down’. This implementation and the plugins used were occasionally buggy since they would sometimes work, but sometimes not. Another frequent challenge was Roblox itself shutting down periodically throughout the day, halting our progress. About 10 times on Saturday, we would all get kicked off Roblox Studio because of network connection difficulties due to 1 million players trying to play the “Blox Fruit” game, and overloading all the servers and we also just lost a ton of time from it. Other more minor issues were designing the proper scripts to perform the actions we wanted them to do, and that process was overall fine, just took some trial and error and some external research on Roblox dev posts or informational YouTube tutorials. All four of us also did this from scratch without having any knowledge of Roblox Studio and scripting, so in that sense there was a learning curve challenge where we had to teach ourselves everything. Overall, I think we were able to overcome these issues and create a proper game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re most proud of how all the puzzles turned out in game and how they connected to others for each puzzle. One of our favorite puzzles utilizes sounds as the clue, which was very cool to implement, as well as another clue which is triggered from a certain phrase sent in the chat bar. Also very proud with how detailed we were able to make Rice Hall look in Roblox down to the Einstein’s on floor one. Overall, we all had a lot of fun with this and are proud of the overall result.

What we learned

We learned how to use Roblox Studio, Lua, and the plugins used for the cutscenes. More specifically, we learned how to make an elevator with a keypad lock, enter in a certain phrase in chat and have clues appear, and improved upon our collaboration and communication skills, building solid relationships with our teammates.

What's next for Rice Hall Escape

We first would want to re-implement would want to implement harder puzzles and touch up the cosmetics factor of the game, touching up real-life objects in Rice Hall and translating that to the game. Additionally, we’d want to add to the ambiance and possibly have rain in the background or thunder and flickering lights, given more time to make the experience even more immersive.