JS: Hi Daniel, thanks so much for joining me today to talk about the behind-the-scenes of The Legend of the Yeti.
DR: Thanks for having me!
JS So glad I can pick the brain of the lead designer on Legend of the Yeti! I’m curious: How did this idea come into being? Where did Legend of the Yeti come from?
DR: For Yeti specifically, our executive team did some polling and research in collaboration with our Game Design team on themes that would interest our guests. After that, the Game Design team takes over and develops the idea further until the game releases!
JS: So, the overall plot line is your direction?
DR: Yes, our team handles all of the storyline, puzzle creation, scenic and environmental design that goes into the game. It was a pretty big challenge at the beginning of the process, specifically asking ourselves, ‘How do we bring this mythical creature into an immersive experience?’ Our main goal with our games is to make you feel like you are in the universe, so how do we bring in a nonexistent character into that?
JS: Absolutely! Say I haven’t played the game yet, and SPOILERS for Legend of the Yeti incoming, what is the overall plot line for our newest game?
DR: The plot for Yeti is that you are outside this abandoned outpost in the Himalayas, and you’ve just gotten word that a famous jewel has gone missing. You’re now tasked with locating it and, unfortunately… You’re not the only one who’s after it, and not everything in these mountains is human after all!
JS: Some jewel competition! That’s tough. What was the drafting process for the storyline like?
DR: We had about 20 or so different narrative options that we went through. They were everything from a gift shop where the Yeti is disguised as your tour guide to a full-blown mountain rescue mission. Oh, and a lot of researcher-based plots too…
JS: How did we decide which theme was going to be our winner?
DR: Ultimately, the immersive nature of these story lines is what weeded them out from our end product. We want our guests to feel like they could really live this theme out. The other ideas just didn’t strike the same chord as competing with a Yeti to find a missing jewel.
JS: And it is such a good theme! I had such a blast playing it myself but thought it was SUPER challenging. I do know that a lot of people are excitedly waiting for our next 9/10 difficulty room. How did we decide the difficulty of Legend of the Yeti?
DR: There was definitely a point where Legend of the Yeti was supposed to be a 9/10. Looking at our recent games, our newest content has leaned toward the 6 or 7 out of 10 difficulties, so we have wanted to put a harder game into the mix. We backed off from the 9/10 in the middle of the process to save it for something that will truly live up to the Prison Break caliber.
JS: I’m looking forward to it! Prison Break is my favorite game.
DR: Oh! Also on the topic of difficulty, when we’re designing puzzles, we’re always thinking about difficulty in the back of our minds. There are always certain levers that we can pull to adjust how hard a puzzle is, which is used in a lot of our testing process. Once guests interact with the game, we can see if something was too difficult and rein it in, or vice versa. The Game Team is a bunch of puzzle nerds, so we typically design too hard and have to scale it back, haha!
JS: That leads me into my next question! How do “play testers” shape the experience of the room? What’d you learn from your first few runs of Legend of the Yeti?
DR: Play testing is huge. It’s the core thing of what we do. Regardless of how we think a puzzle will be experienced, all that matters is how the guest interacts with it. If a puzzle is frustrating, we’ll cut it completely. Nothing is sacred to us; we’d modify anything. Yeti had changes up until the last day of play testing; we were still modifying and dialing it in.
We also take notes throughout the whole process. As most folks might know, your game guide isn’t in the room during your game at The Escape Game. But, for our early demos, we join the game with guests in order to read facial expressions and really see how they really interact with game components.
JS: I play-tested Yeti and thought it was so special. I was fascinated by how much attention was given to our every move.
DR: Another great experience was getting to have our executive team and founders be the first people to play the game. Which was super stressful!
JS: Haha! Like… Hope you guys like it and escape!
DR: Well, and talk about difficult, it took them about an hour and twenty minutes to finish the game, and they’re kinda experts at escape rooms, so we realized it was a bit too hard!
JS: So they got the hardest version of the game?
DR: Oh yeah, definitely. We also loved watching our various team members play and see if they could beat it or not.
JS: For those who may be curious, how do people become play testers for The Escape Game?
DR: It is a different process each time. For Yeti, our local store in Nashville started taking emails from those who were interested in the store, and those folks were contacted when our early signups went live.
Our typical process tends to start with internal games for those who work in our headquarters, then extend it to our local team, then friends and family of our team, and then our public demos will go live. Y’all don’t want to play the first games, trust me. Those public demos tend to be the closest to the real product, while still being exclusive.
JS: If you are interested in demoing our games, email is always a good place to stay tuned in for those dates! But, moving on, I’ve only ever seen the end product. How do we go from conceptualization into our build process, into installing the game in store?
DR: At the beginning of Yeti, our Game Design team each made 3-4 separate pitches, came together and debated them, then workshopped based on what we liked from each idea. We then created the first passes on puzzles and mockups, which were passed to our R&D team. They develop the real prototypes from our cardboard and paper mockups.
Their prototypes are unfinished, typically made out of wood, so that we can see how our puzzles will exist in space and hold up with continued use. Durability is huge for us.
JS: I’ve accidentally broken quite a few locks. Durability is important, folks! So, then our install team brings our games from The Adventure Factory, where we make all of our games, to our stores. How long does that process tend to take?
DR: Yes, they do! There are a few timelines there… For production, it takes about a month to create all of the components. All components go through creation, assembly, painting, tech for wiring, and then our quality control team, who ensures they’re top-notch.
Finally, install. Legend of the Yeti was our shortest install to date, actually! It took 9 days, and we plan to scale it back to 7 days. That way, we can drop it into a new store in a single week.
JS: I did see some behind-the-scenes footage of the painting process, that’s all hand-painted, right?
DR: Yes! The ice is all painted with airbrushes, and custom murals get painted in the first room. We can’t pre-paint those wall panels, so each store will be a little different!
JS: What was it like to see the first build of Legend of the Yeti? I’m sure you were involved in the process the whole way through, but was there a moment of reveal at the end?
DR: It’s wild seeing it coming together. Like ‘that was the thing that was in my head, and now it’s real! We did have 3D renderings of the game, but to actually see it in person is very satisfying. This was a 10-month process, almost a year of my life, that I spent thinking about this game, and all of a sudden, here it is!
JS: I can only imagine. When guests do play Legend of the Yeti, they’ll find that there are quite a few WOW moments. How important was getting these right in your process? What was the process of getting those right?
DR: How spoiler-y are we going…
JS: Another warning! Spoilers incoming!
DR: So the Yeti interactions were our biggest priority. We had to have those interactions hit right. I had a big breakthrough on how they would first appear in the outpost. The idea of the jewel being visible the whole time but unreachable and then having the Yeti steal it from under your nose was the perfect narrative. We wanted it to be sorta playful, and so I spent so long messing with the timing, audio, and visuals of that interaction to make it feel real and satisfying. If any of those aren’t perfect, it’ll feel hokey.
JS: And the Yeti’s face? How did we decide the final look?
DR: We had quite a few mock-ups at first. Finally, we luckily had a team member with a background in theater makeup who volunteered to create a latex mask and create the face of our game. From there, it was a fantastic actor and our videographer who filmed it in one afternoon. Funnily enough, it was 4 hours of makeup to film a 4 or 5-second clip. So worth it for the reveal.
JS: The Yeti’s hand… How many iterations did we go through?
DR: Because the Yeti’s hand is in the last puzzle of the game, it was a huge matter for us to get it right. At one point, the trade sequence was quite a bit longer, but we cut it down to where it is to nail the feeling of satisfaction.
JS: I was certainly obsessed with the whole sequence. To be honest, I had been fed a rumor that there was a full-blown animatronic Yeti, haha!
DR: Well… Animatronic was in the cards for a little while. We have an engineering team with a background in robots and animatronics. We have the team for it, so… who knows?
JS: No promises! So how about the snow? How hard was that to create?
DR: We did…. Soooo many tests on the snow. There are just so many different types of snow fluid that can be used, but we were also battling with the inherent noise of those machines. We also didn’t want a fluid that could potentially irritate skin or wear down our game components. Lastly, we wanted to make sure that it fell correctly; some looked like bubbles, and we really wanted to nail the snow feeling.
JS: I thought it was spot on. Another rumor I heard was about a supposed… Cat mode.
DR: Haha, yes! That one is real. But we haven’t leaked it yet. We were going to leak it to one source and see how it spreads. Maybe… this could be the leak.
JS: Ooooh. You heard it here first! Ask for Cat mode if you play Legend of the Yeti!
DR: Troy, a game designer and developer on Great Big Game Show, does all of our SFX and music for our games. When I let him know I needed Yeti sound effects, he was like ‘Okay, cool, I also made cat mode!’ I didn’t ask for it, but it is fantastic.
JS: That’s so cool. As we wrap, I am curious. What was the most unexpected part of creating Legend of the Yeti?
DR: Well, I’ll tell you something that I realized as we were creating Legend of the Yeti. It may be a tad strange… but it was REALLY hard not to accidentally design weapons.
JS: *Laughs*
DR: There were quite a few things that we would design and then create, and after looking at them, we would realize it would be so easy to accidentally get hurt with them. The Ice Maze in the final room was quite a hazard for fingers, as the disc used to be pretty heavy, and it was super easy to get your fingers in the paths. We ended up tightening the paths and made it impossible to jam your fingers into, plus we made the disc quite a bit lighter just in case. We triple solved that problem.
JS: That is such a silly quirk to run into!
DR: I really thought the Ice Maze was the coolest puzzle, and totally forgot that gravity existed.
JS: I’m glad that you found some workarounds with gravity. Gotta keep our guests safe!
Well, Daniel, thank you so much for talking with me today! This was so fun getting to peek behind the curtain.
DR: Thanks for having me! I hope everyone enjoyed playing Legend of the Yeti for themselves!
