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Digital Escape Rooms (with Lydia Symchych)
All of your hosts are together in the Clubhouse for a special interview! Lydia Symchych is an impact game designer who has been working with Ellen over the last year. Today, she shares her experience of making an escape room that needed to be rendered in both "physical" and and digital environments. Also, sound effects and pillows.
In the USA, November 28th is Thanksgiving Day, and November 29th is National Native American Heritage Day. Happy holidays, if you're in the USA—and if you're not, we hope you have something to be thankful for. 💖
Digital Escape Rooms
Game DesignArticulate Storyline 360HyperCard - WikipediaExhibit Design - WikipediaEscape Room Races with the Lads - Northernlion, YouTubeEscaping a Room of Terrors - GameGrumps, YouTube- Duration:
- 1h 9m
- Broadcast on:
- 28 Nov 2024
- Audio Format:
- other
From Noble Robot on East Hennepin Avenue in contained in Minneapolis, this is my Scapes Club. The show we're nice game devs to have games in game development. I'm Ellen Burns-Jogsson, and I make nice games. I'm Steve McGregor, and I make nice games. And I'm Mark the Corolla. I, too, make nice games. In this episode, we are all in the clubhouse while we talk with Lydia Sinchich, game designer for EOB Learning, to discuss digital escape rooms. So, if everyone's ready, let's start. We're around a single table in a single place. Yes. We do like to get excited about that, and listeners are like, "I don't care if it sounds the same." Same, yeah. Yeah, it's different for us, the later listener. Right, right, right. But not only are all three of your nice hosts around the table, our guest is here, a live in person as well. Hi. Lydia, hi. Welcome to the clubhouse. Thank you. Why don't you introduce Lydia, because you know her. Lydia is great. Oh, thank God. Job done. Good intro. Okay. To be fair, Ellen has talked you up a lot over the past few weeks. Oh, no. Yeah. No pressure. We spent three episodes digging deep into Lydia's backstory. No. So, in the snippets of Ellen updates that we kind of occasionally talk about, so I joined D.L.B. learning as a game designer coming in from one of the companies that they acquired. And then I moved on to something else within the company, and that left a big gap in terms of game design brain. And Lydia is the person who has come in to fill that void. Yeah. Yeah. I think I went to the women in games session for IDGA Foundation Twin Cities. I met your wife, who, and I explained my backstory. Oh, he was pointing at me. And said, "Oh, have you seen Ellen's post? They need a positive impact educational game designer. You should talk to her because she's great." And I was like, "Oh, cool." And so that's how I found a job. Yay. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Networking. Yeah. I do like it. There's kind of a dream of community. It's like when things cross-pollinate. So, I do like to see when that happens. Yeah. Yeah. And I think from that moment, because Ellen, you were in Lydia drawing, you were like, "This lady's great." Like from that moment, you got to get her on the show. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And now we have. And what forever for? Well, so you've been doing a few different projects for EOB learning since you joined the crew, and you've been working on a product, and you've been working on projects, and one of the projects that you've been working on for the past several months is now. I mean, it's been kind of a weird one. It was like kind of a slow start, and then all of a sudden a huge scramble, and then kind of a little bit more chill at the end. But you've been working on an escape room for a health care association, so you can give all the background that you want. But it started as a physical escape room, and then moved to a digital format. Yeah. Yeah. And this was interesting because you had worked on the last year with the same client, previous year's digital escape room, but not the in-person escape room. Right. And that went really, really well. I got to play it. It's really good. I'm award-winning, even. Yeah. I think it was fun. Yeah. So it was kind of-- it was interesting because I was going on to this project where you had already met the client, you had already worked on this sort of thing, but not on the part of the project that was going to be first. Right. Yeah. So the last month or so has really been the part that you will find more familiar because it's the digital version of the escape room in Storyline. Yeah. So not a game engine, but in Storyline, which I-- this is the first time I've worked with someone who-- with developers building in that. Yeah. Storyline, just for some background, it's called a rapid authoring tool. So it really is kind of a-- it's a tool for developing basic interactivity quickly. Yeah. Like the coolest PowerPoint you've ever seen, and then add some steroids to that. Yeah. There's a surprising amount that you can do with it, but it's also some things that are very given and easy to do in game engines, not possible. Yeah. Because it acts more like a PowerPoint presentation. Yeah. Sure. It kind of has-- I don't know if any of you will remember, but, like, hypercard. A little bit. No. Oh, hypercard. Look it up. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't do branching super well. No. Okay. That's part of the problem. Yeah. Oh, it's a thing. Oh. It's like-- Oh, even more to the PowerPoint then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's more like a PowerPoint. We-- we-- a lot of it that was-- we can talk about that part, but a lot of it was working with the Allen's title as a art director. Yeah. Yeah. He's a creative director. Yeah. So working with the creative director on how to mitigate how many variables there are, because if something changes in the room and you go back there, that's a whole other set of variables that you have to deal with and that you have to implement and that like exponentially creates work and creates content that you have to build. It can't say, oh, if you do X, this is no longer here. Yeah. That's a very easy Boolean that you could just put anywhere else. Can't do that. Oh. Yeah. So a lot of it was trying-- a lot of that conversation was trying to make sure that we mitigate how many variables and deciding, OK, well, how-- how many continuity errors and what kinds of continuity errors are we OK with because they're not obtrusive and-- and we're just going to build that in. Yeah. But before I became a video game designer, I-- after college, I originally wanted to do-- I didn't know what I wanted to do. And so I started in exploring museums and I found that I really, really loved exhibit design. Oh. I don't trust this care. I am not someone who is patient or delicate enough to do collections care every single day of my life. Sure. It's awesome. I-- I don't trust myself to do it all the time. But exhibit design was awesome and I loved that and so that-- this really got to go back to those roots of, OK, how are we going to build something that could be broken is going to be dirty? Like the-- the sheer amount of things that people will touch, even though it seems obvious they shouldn't touch it, the amount of-- like the creative ways kids can break things. There aren't-- there weren't going to be kids at this conference but making sure that it's something that can be handled and broke and like moved and dropped and stuff. All of that harkening back to that experience as well as trying to fit a lot of stuff in a small space. Right. It was like 10 by 10 or something like that. Not that small but it was pretty dank small. It was pretty small. Yeah. So I'm wondering if we like start with-- we want to give more background on what the project was about. You're going to have to lead that because I don't know how much I can't-- we can give. Yeah. I can give some. So the organization that we are working with is one that is-- it's an organization of medical professionals. So physicians, nurses, et cetera. It's like tens of thousands of members around the world. Most of them are in the US but they have a pretty significant percentage they were international. And because they're a professional association, like what professional associations do is they advocate for their members. So they try to come up with opportunities for networking or for continuous learning and so on and so forth. Oftentimes there will be some sort of continuing education requirement that people have to meet on an annual basis in order to maintain their license and that's not just for medical practitioners but for lots of different industries that require licenses. And there's also like an information dissemination thing because there's always stuff being improved upon and invented and iterated and researched. And so being able to get some of the word out either on something that's already existing that you need to learn and specialize in or just, hey, this is new, more people should know about it, we want to let people know even just a little bit about a new drug or a new technique or a new standard of care or something like that. Yeah. So it's dissemination of information, education, et cetera. And they also have a big annual conference to bring all this together and to highlight some of that. So what they've been doing, a couple of the things they've been doing is creating more interactive, more interesting learning experiences that are really short because you know, doctors and nurses and such are super busy and they don't have a lot of time between patients and so on and so forth. And also, you know, when you're done with the workday, the last thing you want to do is like sit and read a 50 page PowerPoint or PDF or whatever, like so if there are more interesting ways to that aren't so taxing on your execution capacity, that's something that they've been exploring too. And one of the things that they've been doing is they've been doing gamification and they have a gamified platform and then on that they will put little mini games. And so the game that we built last year was the mini game and then what they wanted us to do this year would eventually become a mini game they would put on their platform but they wanted to start with this in-person escape room that would be at their conference that people would go through like six to ten people at a time. And so like, you know, it has to have all the check marks that a short game would have, right? It has to have a compelling like framing, it has to have interesting challenges, it has to be collaborative but then also like it can't be super long and also has to have a lot of really specific content embedded into it because it's about something that's medically relevant, right? It also has a unique demand of being like a conference like novelty, right? Like you go on a show floor, you stand in line to spin a wheel in front of a merch booth or a free t-shirt, it's that kind of thing, kind of. Yes, but like more helpful. Right, well that's what I mean is that like the audience rolling through is a little bit different than if it's like a seminar you bring everyone to, you know? Yeah, but then like, yeah, it's voluntary, you know, so it's got to be fun. And yeah, it's more, it's, it is supposed to be more meaningful and professionally helpful than like a free t-shirt. Well, I think also, what, what, what it more like what your free t-shirt example kind of demonstrates is that this is something that you have to be able to wait in line for and then do quickly before your next scheduled event. Yes. Because a conference will have something every hour or multiple things every hour that you're trying to fit into your agenda to make sure that you hit everything before the conference ends because it's only a weekend, but, and so this can't be an hour thing slotted into that schedule. It has to be short enough that even if you're waiting for it or if you have to leave and come back, you can do it before your next one or before lunch or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, that's a lot of really specific limitations. Yeah. Yeah. It's really difficult. I imagine to make a game that fits in that. And I have a ton of million questions about like the decision making process towards doing it in this format, but that's on the client side. Yeah, they kind of, they kind of came to us with that request upfront, right? It's not something that we talked with them about. It may have been like, this is a fun idea or like they may have like thought of all the implications they may not have. Well, I think Don has paper rooms before. Yeah. Okay. They have done. And that was one of the things that we got to see photographs of previous ones. I wanted to just get a sense of puzzles. So they were able to answer some questions. They had all the dimensions already. They were able to give that and give the layout of the room that would be built in. There's actually two rooms running simultaneously next to each other in a conference. I didn't even know that. Yeah. I didn't know that until halfway through the design process that, oh, there's two rooms running simultaneously. Yeah. But that's the other thing is also unlike real escape rooms where there's someone looking at it like a facilitator or a game master looking through a camera and then able to give hints, they don't have that infrastructure in a conference room. It's just they build a little room with no ceiling in the middle of a floor. And so as far as like supervision or observation or any of that sort of hint giving, that can't be reliably assumed to have. Oh, I thought you were going to say they had someone on a ladder. No. I guess if you're going to do it, it might as well be at a conference of doctors, but yeah. Okay. So it needs to be kind of needs to be self sustaining and like robust and like handle failure gracefully. Yes. And be resetable. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Right. It's like if you are someone who's like, oh, I want to learn to design escape rooms. This seems like a great like crash course, like try a lot of fire for that because it heightens up a lot of the things that escape rooms have just, you know, but generally not as much. Yeah. And it's also, it's, it's a nice set of limitations because it asks you to think creatively about your props and your storyline and your puzzle flow, but also it really does make you have to work small. Yeah. It's, it's so hard to think small, you can get, you can get everything so big, but also then because you've made it small, you can, there's so many things that if we had more time, we would have been able to do in a lot more cooler way. Obviously, there's more detail we could have added or some more fun interactions we could have manufactured, but you know, that's, that's scope. But having a smaller, having that small format means that you actually could feasibly, if you wanted to do that as your first project, that I think it would work really well. So this is last year's. No, this is now it is. It is not done yet. No. Well, the escape room is. The escape room happened. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I was saying there was something different about last year's versus this year. Yeah. Last year's was never intended to be, there was never supposed to be an in person experience. It was digital from the start and digital only. Okay. So the challenge, the extra layer of challenge, yeah, for so for this year, totally different project. Okay. Different, you know, partner that the, our client was working with. So there's like a different source of funding. And they're for a different topic of content, different topic. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Exactly. And yeah, they wanted to do the in person escape room first and then create a digital version of it so that people who weren't able to make it to the conference, who wanted to go through it again or whatever could go and go on to that gamified platform and launch this mini game and then go through this escape room. Yeah. So. Also, effectively you're like translating. Well, I guess you're translating the digital version of it into a physical version. Well, I'm certainly not doing any of it. Right. Except we did it, we did it vice versa. We'd made the physical version and designed it first and then with, with mind of it eventually being translated to digital. Right. And so there were things in the design where, you know, I already had an idea of ideally what it would look like in the digital version or how it would work and then or there were things that, okay, we were limited by the type of props we had, the type of locks we could get, for instance. So okay, we'll, we'll, then we'll keep it this in our back pocket of we would really love the code for this particular puzzle to be XYZ. They don't make locks like that. So we'll save that for the digital version and we'll do a close second for the physical version based on the lock, the padlocks we could buy. Right. So rather than letting the physical version immediately constrain your scope, you kept in mind, like, that was not fully independent of it, but you didn't let it constrain you more than it had. Yeah. Okay. So what was the timeline on that? Because the thing that's getting me is like the sort of evolution of this is a concept. Yes. But this previous client had an existing thing. They had your, you guys do a digital version and then you, then you develop the systems for this sort of, this sort of work, then a new client wants it, but also they want a physical version first. So it's kind of like has, it has, you know, many parents in a sense. Yeah. I think it wasn't necessarily parents, but I think it had a very weird history because I could go to Ellen for anything about the digital version because you had had that experience of devving forward. And I specifically remember asking you about some of the limitations of storyline while I was designing the physical escape room. So that way I wouldn't make something so, I wouldn't have to redesign a puzzle completely because it just physically would not work in storyline. Oh my God. I'm so excited. We're like only 17 minutes in and we already got to everything is everything. Yeah. Wow. Is that a record? Amazing. Probably not, but it's a good one. Yeah. Uh, because you didn't have the president with the client of having designed the physical escape room, they designed it with other people, a question mark. There's a bit of that, uh, new relationship like, okay, what are you expecting of me? How have you done this before? Because you've done it before. Is my way of doing it going to cause problems or how do we approach this communication? And so in that respect, I think that's where there was a little bit of negotiation and just trying to feel each other out because they already had that history of making the in-person escape rooms and like some of that infrastructure, but, you know, and they had had a precedent of working with us for the digital stuff, not necessarily for the in-person escape room. Some of them just trying to figure that out. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I think the reason I think that the last year's game, that last year's game is worth mentioning just to provide the context is because it was, uh, like the anchoring experience of the current relationship with the customer, you know? So like various people, the specific project team that was involved in supporting that project was new and working with one another. Many of us hadn't worked with that customer before, you know, we were going for something that was a little more, that was significantly more elevated in terms of its game feel than I think some previous digital experiences had been able to achieve. And so we pushed ourselves to do something pretty awesome. And that set a really high bar, which then Lydia had to then also jump in and navigate. Yeah. The thing that was really nice though, is that having the example of that previous game immediately my thought was like, oh, this reminds me so much of like the classic point and click mystery adventure game. So like your Nancy Drews, your, uh, there was an old Sherlock game, Sherlock Holmes game set in a museum or something that I remember playing. There's, you know, that sort of thing. And there's also a certain level of jank to those that that has lowered the bar in terms of affordances that I had to think about because anything where it's like, oh, this is a little bit not, it's not super sexy, it's not super polished, not very, not got a lot of juice or detail, but it's consistent with the genre. So like if I saw this happening in a Nancy Drew game or if I saw it happening in one of those point and click games, I would totally be like, okay, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, this before, or yeah, this is acceptable level. Yeah. That was always my metric. Hey, that's flavor and add some texture. Yeah. It just, and it feels more genuine and I don't know how many people actually are going to be looking at this and going, oh yeah, that feels right to the genre. People actually said that at the awards, they were like, this feels exactly like those games. And I was like, okay, cool, um, that was, I mean, cause that's, that's the thing is that that was a very centering way of evaluating how high polish it had to be. Yeah. It kind of is that, that project established a design language within this context with this customer, with this client that you were then able to lean into when you started working on the puzzles and the digital transformation. So I think translation, I guess digital translation, yeah, I'm really glad that first project went well so that you could bounce on it like a little trampoline of, yeah, yeah, because you had a much, I thought you had a much harder, um, I thought you had a much harder challenge in front of you because of the two pronged, you had to have two builds of the game that were on completely different platforms really. I mean, maybe, but the thing is, is I had worked in physical space before. Yeah. Okay. And I basically said, okay, well, we have a one room escape room for the real thing. There exist one room puzzle rooms. And I had remembered, cause I watched a lot of let's players, I had seen people do one room puzzle escape rooms before there are a couple of games. I mean, one is called Skate Room Simulator. I watched Northern Lion play it. He's a streamer from, or he's a, yeah, he's a streamer from Vancouver, Canada. I've watched him. Yeah. He's great. Um, and then the game grumps played a game which was all like one room puzzle rooms where you had to kill the guests at a mansion. Each one, you had to kill the resident staying in that room and I can't remember the name of it. Uh, like, they're all anthropomorph, they're all animals. If that helps, um, makes it worse. Yeah. Um, we can find the name of that in a bit, but like, yeah. So what I did is I remember, um, the, the project hadn't signed yet. The contract hadn't signed, but I really wanted to start researching. So I was like, Ellen, I really want to do it. I think in July of, of the year of this year, and you said, okay, time box it to eight hours. I think that's all we can, I can really justify having you do before the contract is signed. I was like, cool. Um, and so I did a bunch of research. I started looking at a bunch of those videos, following along and making little flow charts and writing notes about how a little webs of how the puzzles and each piece of information and each puzzle followed into another in those one room puzzle rooms, both in Northern line and in game grumps. I actually found something really interesting. They had the same basic structure and between, you know, Northern line being one person and the game grumps being two people and Northern line very only once asking chat for help because he was live on, on Twitch when he was playing it, despite like the, the differences in terms of number of brains working on the puzzles, they all were between 15 and 17 minutes long. Oh, interesting. And every one. Yeah. Perfect. Which was exactly the time that we needed to make it because we only could bank on people. We had like a hard 20 minute max. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for a conference event, that seems actually kind of generous, but also objectively very tight. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It is both. And so I, you know, I mapped them out and I found, you know, the common blueprint where essentially in one room, there was a obvious track. There was like a obvious one, one thing to one thing to one thing. Then there was one which I would call looping where it's like you, you start on one thing and it gives you something else. And then you have to go to a different puzzle, use that information to solve that puzzle. Yeah. And then those two things combine to do that. There was, there's one where it is not linear, but it is like immediate. You find it and you put it in the lock. Right. And then there was a fourth one. I can't remember what it is, but that was the other thing is that it always had four things combining together to, to be the final puzzle. Interesting. It was four keys into like four locks that then open the door or more usually four keys to one lock, which then leads to one more puzzle. And then that's what you do. Right. Yeah. Final boss. Yeah. Yeah. But, but an easier final loss to, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love easy final bosses. I think we've talked about on this show before actually that that's, you want to like reward the player, like giving them like extra power fantasy rather than like frustrate them. Yeah. They've completed all their frustrations. Plus like there's a time limit in this. So like, yeah. Yeah. Specifically, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, it, it, it is the emotional climax. Exactly. You want to feel like you've had the absolute crescendo moment and you want to feel your most competent. Yes. Exactly. Because you want at that point, that's the moment where you're like, I solved it. Yeah. If you're Sam Sarana, you've, you absorb the energy of the Metroid and now whatever alien baddie you're facing down doesn't stand a chance. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So that, that was what I did in eight hours before the contract got signed. Yeah. So I had a plan and I very much, and I already, I, I also, one of the major things from the previous game that I wanted to avoid was that because in the previous game you were walking through a mansion, like you were walking through a old Victorian home, kind of Victorian era mansion. Yeah. I was refusing wandering through those spaces because like going, you know, screen by screen through 3D space, you get lost very easily, you don't know where you are. And that was something that I remember was difficult for the final game, but especially difficult when you were working with the client and another designer and the developers in development. Where does this go? How do we do this? What is the structure of this? And so I also really wanted to lean into taking the one room puzzle room and then making like building for that and then having that directly translated into a one actually two room digital experience is I wanted to avoid that problem again. Yeah. And I felt like it would also port a lot cleaner because you can't really simulate multiple locations in one room. I think they've done that in the past and it's been like fine, but it definitely feels like you ported it the other way around if you do that. Yeah. And I really wanted it to be one room in there. And I also, because I imagined like if you're standing in the middle of the room navigating the room is you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot, you pivot. Oh, eventually you get to the same like, yeah, part, that's a lot easier for you to imagine on a series of screens as opposed to moving from one room and then back from one room or turning around in that room, but then which door was it, you know, that's confusing. So just to, I wonder if maybe not going into too much detail so we don't talk about the subject matter, but could you talk about like the narrative framing that we leaned on? Because I think that there was a really good, like a really good marriage between the constraints, how you wanted to approach the constraints and what we talked about early on, the setting should be and so on and so forth. Yeah. So is it too much of a hint if I say that it's from my home state? No, I don't think so. Okay. So the conference was held at my home state and the client's boss, I think, someone on the client's side, but one of his stakeholders brought in, it was one of those, someone's new, someone's like, someone just joined one meeting and says an idea. Very rarely do you actually get to entertain those because oftentimes they can be derailing or they can be just too big and that's kind of a bummer. Yeah. This one, she said, is there any way that we could, like this is happening in Massachusetts? Is there any way that we could bring some of that in? I was like, yeah, we can. I know that. We can totally do that. And so I did, like that, that was very nice, but that was the one thing that the, the, you know, kind of higher up person suggested and it was so actionable to do. That's great. And it's also like, I know this area. And so the narrative is you, your sister rose, she is a lighthouse keeper. So the experience begins by her explaining that long time ago in the late 1700s during the Revolutionary War, a pirate made a deal with an entity of the sea for essentially control of the weather, control of the seas in exchange for a price. And so, and then they, that deal was sealed with a token, which is this amulet that every light house, a lighthouse keeper has. Okay. The artifact, um, the, the cost is the disease, uh, the disease or the, um, uh, ailment that is the topic of the escape room. So essentially long time ago, made a pact. This was a huge boon. He made his wealth. He decided to continue taking advantage of it by building a lighthouse and using it to protect the bay. He died eventually and passed it on in every lighthouse keeper since has had this artifact taken advantage of it to keep the bay safe and keep the seas calm around the lighthouse and also succumb to this illness. So Rose is now in the hospital and again, because this happens, she's been quite sick. And so she basically in the letter explains to you her sibling that this is what happens and says, I, I think that we need to return it to the sea. We need to just give the artifact back now, now it is time. I can't do it because I'm in the ER. I entrust you to do it. You need to find the pirate morgains treasure, like chest, all the information of where to bring it will be in there if you can get to it. So you're this person sibling. You go into her home. It's the lighthouse keeper's quarters. And then in the digital, in, in the IRL escape room, we had locks on a chest, which was pirate morgains chest. And then that opened up the stuff you need for the final puzzle in the digital room. We got to do what I actually really wish we could have done, but we can install an extra door and not expect people to break it. You're in the keeper's quarters. The three locks are on the door to the lighthouse tower. So you get into the lighthouse tower, you're at the base. That's where you find the chest from the pirate morgain from the late 1700s. And then you do the final puzzle, you figure out, you find the location where you need to give the, you know, deliver the court, bring the artifact to, and then you return the artifact and that doesn't cure her of her disease, but essentially, like, means that she doesn't, no one else will have to have this affliction. Yeah. So yeah, that's what you do. So you have to get through three locks in her keeper's quarters and then you get into the lighthouse itself. The cold weather is coming fast. What's the obvious choice for a backyard upgrade? Hint, it's a solo stove with over 220,000 five star reviews. Solo stove is the ultimate fire pit. Just ask Snoop Dogg. Solo stove is a smokeless and that's not blowing smoke with a patented design with signature 360 degree airflow technology to feed the flames and burn off smoke before it gets into your hair or clothes. 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Is that the logo on it? It's cool. Yeah. We have something new. Oh. Mark? Uh-huh. Wait. This wasn't my idea. I should not be the one to announce it. Okay. Well, I was having a pillow and Lydia was here again. Hi. Um, was talking about making it into this thing eventually into just a cartridge shaped thing. But like, now we have a pillow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ice Games Club pillow. No. This is the first time I've heard of this. Ice Games Club pillow. Okay. And it is the first time you've heard of this. Yes. Because Mark had literally just made it. Okay. It's the public spot. And, but when this episode comes out, if whoever edits it reminds me, you can go to nicegames.club/merch, which is now the home for multiple things. Oh. It's not just a shirt no more. Okay. You can still go to nicegames.club/shirt. Yeah. And nostalgia. But nostalgia purposes take you directly to the shirt. By the shirt. Yeah. But do you want the new pillow? It's a throw pillow. Three inches on a side. It's got our cartridge logo, which is different from the logo that's on the shirt. Yeah. The one that's in the corner of our website, which Steven, that logo is your idea. Oh, yeah. Way back when. I forgot. So we haven't put it on anything before other than the website. So that's cool. Maybe we'll put down on a shirt one day, but you know what? Take it step by step. Mm-hmm. Yep. It's a new pillow option. Yeah. We've got a nice games.club/merch and get a new pillow. Yeah. Oh, man. Tell your friends. This is big news. It is big news. And I think one of you were saying you don't have to get the shirt and the pillow, but I'm just a official policy. You do. You do have to get both. Yeah. You don't have to get them both at the same time. Right. You should have both. We won't be able to police this action, but like those are the rules. It's. So yeah. Yeah. My pillow is on the way right now. Yeah. I didn't actually buy it yet, but I will. I'm going to go to this DURO right now. Look down. Are you wearing a shirt? If no. By shirt. Yes. You probably need more than one shirt. Yeah. Are you taking a nap? If no. By this pillow. How's your butt feeling? Is your chair too hard? You should get a pillow. Yeah. We should have you on for all of these. I live here. You cook. It's nice games.club/merch. Yeah, they wanted originally, they were looking at something kind of Tomb Raider-esque or like Mummy-esque where you have a ancient curse kind of artifact. They wanted that sense of like treasure hunters. Yeah. I brought up that even if it is a nondescript tropical island, that's still pretty and trying in and so one of the first things I brought up in an attempt to try to move away from that very cliche and still kind of problematic, but still holding on to the idea of adventure and treasure and oh, can this really be explained kind of question? Yeah. I was thinking, okay, well, modern treasure hunters, modern, I was thinking a lot about urban explorers, people who like look around abandoned buildings. The fact that there are islands like there are islands that used to be forts or military bases or you know, just random rocks in like even they have a caught off the coast of Rhode Island and stuff, thinking about that and a lighthouse ended up being one of the things that we thought, okay, that's a structure where someone actually still lives, but probably cycled through a lot of history and is something that we can have that kind of abandoned old but mysterious thing. And so then we then having the artifact to be something that, you know, she definitely has a modern disease process as well as the past lighthouse keepers had the same disease. But even if we can't explain it, it's so consistent that it doesn't invite that question of is it really the artifact? Was it always the artifact? Is it just the environment they lived in? Because there's definitely environmental stressors here, you know, trying to get some of that mystery back in. Yeah. I'm very glad that they agreed to it because I think it turned into something really, really interesting and unique. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of layers to it. And I think you navigated that tension between like, okay, we have this vision and we wanted to feel like this. You really navigated hearing that and being like, okay, so what you want is this kind of experience, would you be okay stepping away from these specific ways you've described it and going in this direction and said and they were completely, yeah, they were really glad that I think that, yeah, I think you did a really good job. Yeah. The narrative thing that we had to then extend or be careful about is because we didn't want to do the like, you find an artifact, you get a curse, you then have to solve, figure out how to return the artifact to stop the curse. We then leaned into something where it's an artifact that then is given like handed down. We had to be very careful to not imply that the disease that we were talking about was genetic. Sure. Right. Yeah. So that was one of the things that we had to refine a fair bit in the narrative and then also in the art and stuff to make it very clear, you know, especially because like in the old days jobs were generational, we had to make clear that, okay, know all of these people had this. They're obviously not related. Yeah. And it's therefore, this is not a, like we're not misrepresenting the science. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of an interesting intersection between different demands, right? The story demands a lot of things, the sort of narrative conceits and what is most interesting to a listener of a story, but then at the same time, it needs to be grounded in like the actual lessons you want to teach, right? Right. And not fight against that. I mean, a lot of times if those things are in conflict, you can, as a storyteller, as a designer, you can just pick one. Yeah. Right. But in this case, you actually couldn't, there were things you were constrained by, which was essentially reality, right? Yeah. I think that there were some stories from the source idea that did help a little bit in terms of touchstone of reality. Yeah. The one I kept coming back to just to make myself feel better, that I was, it was possible was the fact that there was the whole idea of the curse of Tutankhamun, where everybody opened up the tomb and then everyone got sick. Yeah. And people have been trying to figure out for decades what exactly were they sick with? And it seems like it was a, like, was it something to do with the tomb? Was it related to the environment? You know, was it mosquito-borne or what? And the fact that it is explainable, but that doesn't stop the power of coincidence. Yes. It looks like the fact that that's still so emotionally compelling, even though it is figured out, that, or, or, um, like the, uh, the curse of Montezuma, the fact, like, it's just travelers' diarrhea, right? The fact that that's still, like, a thing we talk about, and it was so coincidental, but it had a very clear scientific explanation that doesn't mean, like, just the coincidence and the timing of it made it surreal and fantastical. And so holding onto those examples made it at least seem in the moment, as I was trying to figure out, that it was going to be able to, we were going to be able to find that middle ground. Yeah. Do you consider, I mean, the sort of audience of, uh, doctors would be familiar with this type of relationship, uh, between, uh, you know, a knowledge and knowledge receivers, right? So, like, diagnosing patients, having to disabuse them of similar sort of, like, coincidental or, you know, people who are trying to, you know, figure out their own diagnosis or whatever. Not necessarily that this audience is all clinicians, but, um, did you consider that in the design? Like, as a something to lean into, like, this audience has special knowledge. Let's leverage that. Or was it just a matter of making sure that you didn't, um, you know, uh, sort of do something that would, like, essentially be, like, uh, a, a port knowledge for that audience? Yes, but in kind of a way, in a backwards way that I think you're thinking, one of the things that we wanted to emphasize and actually was part of the content was that patients tend to underreport their symptoms and they don't necessarily advocate for their symptoms. And so one of the things that we really emphasized in the diaries of Rose was she keeps saying things like, man, I'm getting old or like, wow, I'm really getting old or like, I'm out of shape. And the fact that, you know, if you have a disease that develops over time or, or is chronic and it lasts a long time, if you're getting worse, people tend to think like, I am getting older. Or like, oh man, I'm just really out of shape. They can dismiss a lot. And so, and, and one of the main things is we needed to, um, emphasize to, to physicians that this is something that happens. And so really making sure that you're asking the right questions to find out is, is there actually something wrong? Are, is there something that they're not telling me? And not necessarily maliciously, something that they don't think realizes actually part of the problem. They may be dismissing it. And that happens a lot. And that also, I mean, that happens a lot for women and other minority groups, especially we, we tend to just push through and we tend to just, uh, you know, kind of brush things away. But especially when you're thinking about preventative or catching things early or actually like really handling a diagnosis properly and in the right timeline, you have to be able to suss that out. Right. Yeah. So yeah. But in kind of a weird backwards way. Yeah. Well, it makes the sort of notion of the, the, um, indirect information, right? You're reading the, the journals of this person, right? Mm. Like that makes it interesting because it's, it's, it's, that's information that comes to you not directly. Yeah. Which is a skill in through the lens you're describing that that is important for doctors to be able to understand information that they're not directly told. Yeah. Um, that's really fascinating. That like really ties together the sort of the conceit of the narrative, the fantastical elements with the sort of like actual data, that without being a direct, what Ellen always talks about all the time with gamification is like, can't just give it a different name and call it education, right? Yeah. Like I don't call it gamification. Like you have to actually like impart it in a way that is, if metaphorical or, uh, you know, circumstantial, if it, because the best way to teach something directly is to teach something directly. Right, right. So rather, you know, rather than just, you know, put a coat of paint on it, all it fun. Yeah. You don't, it's, it should be architectural and not just window dressing. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's really cool to hear that come out exactly as Ellen described it. Yeah. I'm not the only one. Yeah. We also, I think the one thing that is going to be is a little different than what clinicians will actually be able to do in their office is we got to do a fair bit of show, don't tell with the, the environmental storytelling. Cool. So, and this was really cool. So I grabbed, I borrowed an engineer for an emergency play test because I had to figure out something before, uh, bringing, uh, some feedback to, to development between alpha and beta. Yeah. An engineer on, uh, the training arcade. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's great. Um, one of the major things that we wanted as part of, um, this is, uh, the idea of, of understanding that people will tend to under represent their own or under advocate for themselves is part of also social determinants of health. So that is fun, fun little initialism that I learned, but that's a lot of like patients who are from certain demographics tend to have different come in and have, uh, you have to hand, you have to consider that what they're coming in with. So the fact that, you know, women and minorities will tend to under represent their pain, for instance, but also class background. Do they have access to their, uh, to their medications, either physically or monetarily, you know, are their environments a clean? Like what, what are the background forces in their lives, in their individual lives that affect and influence the type of, like how they're going to access care. That's something I think that we were able to show, not tell a fair bit that maybe patients wouldn't necessarily tell that we got to do in the game. One of the things being that there were a lot of environmental things that were aggravating this person's illness we have, we had mouse traps on the floor, we had evidence of cockroaches, we had mold on the walls, we had estimates for future like mold and guano removal of the lighthouse. One of the things also about this being a lighthouse and an old one is that we could have like demonstrate, wow, when you're staring down a $500 roofing repair, like an emergency roofing repair from the last nor Easter, and on top of that, you're getting estimates for mice removal that didn't work clearly. And guano removal and mold removal, yeah, your medication might not come first in terms of payment, especially if it is a lot. And also we wanted it to be at a lighthouse, we, the originally thinking island, we eventually went with like a lighthouse on a peninsula because we wanted being able to go to a specialist or a clinic to be inaccessible. We wanted it to be that the closest thing that they could go to for healthcare was an emergency room. And when you live in a lighthouse, you have to live someplace very far away from people because that's where lighthouses are most useful. And so even just that setting and the remoteness, we were able to do a mix of telling and a mix of showing. Obviously I don't think people are going to be rolling up to their doctors being like, I have so much to pay for. There's so much bat poop in the lighthouse. There was a full in my attic, you know, people tend to try to present themselves better than they may actually be when they're at a specialist office. And that's sometimes a problem. And so that is one thing where I think a hopefully being able to see it for themselves will then light up some or bring up some opportunities for doctors to ask or to inquire or to get us or to try and feel out what is, what are their living conditions or is that affecting them? Yeah. And I like, I like to that you're still like, there's a show don't tell of it all. And there's the, what the, as the sort of character playing the game, you're getting direct information, but then you're exposed all this indirect information. That's really useful because then the next time you get some direct information from a patient, you will start imagining what is the information I'm not getting. Yeah. Because you have this comparative experience, which is really important, but also it's really useful in the constraints of this like conference environment where like people who are not like on that level will just go through the puzzles and get it done in 15 minutes. Like the thing is not stopping you to tell you all this, but so there's a little bit of relying on the participant to engage, but not necessarily holding up the line if they don't. Yeah. Right. So I'm going to talk a little bit Lydia about how you brought that, you know, how the design of the in-person escape room, tried to capture some of that? Like what were some of the features and materials that you had everyone use to do those sorts of things? And then how, how has the process of translating that from the physical to the digital? How's that been going? Pretty well. I think we did a pretty good job with the IRL escape room and the fact that we're keeping it as one, two rooms is helping a fair bit. A lot of it is very much in the set dressing. We have little props that we were able to add. So for example, the Allen the creative director, when he made the paneling for the inside of the walls to make it look like brick, he made it very clearly. There was a whole like swath of mold coming from the ceiling. We were looking at, we definitely wanted some faux like roaches, we were thinking about mouse traps. There was some idea of having mouse droppings. I was like, okay, well, if we really probably should make sure that it's attached to something, so it doesn't drop on the floor. And then the convention people think they have a mouse problem. So like that was my one, that was my one caveat because again, you may not think about that if you don't work in spaces that have to be cleaned, but having like plastic roaches in places or having empty mouse traps around, that was really good. We also tried as much as we could. And this is where some of the content was limiting to have different kinds of written material. So we had journal entries from diary or from from roses diary. We have medical documentation, different types of medical documentation too. We had, but then also invoices and estimates to essentially, you know, things that I was thinking, if you have a desk and you have a bunch of paperwork and you're frustrated by it, you leave it out because you don't know what you're going to do with it. No. Yeah. That is something, what would you find? There was something that, and I don't know where I heard it, but someone I remember talking about or they were talking about how they made characters and one of the things that they did was they tried to imagine what every character had in their trash can. And that's been something I've been thinking a lot about. What do you leave around? It's like the old adage of, you know, a person by looking through their purse. So we have in her trash can a lot of prescriptions, like used prescriptions and prescription like medication containers. Yeah. So like she's going through this like water. Yeah. That's fair. Are all of these things related to the puzzle? I'm curious if like some of this information might lead players astray. We tried really hard to make sure it wouldn't and the thing is we had to cover so much that it ended up being, we had to include, we had to offload a lot of the content off into these sorts of details because otherwise they would just be sitting there and reading and that is a really boring escape. Right. Yeah. A lot of the content was on the same theme, but very disparate in like the type of information. Okay. So like the social determinants of health was a one puzzle. There was a lot of things that was estimates and the mouse traps and the pests and the details there. That was all one puzzle. Yeah. Okay. Another puzzle really focused in on like one piece of documentation, which you had to, which ended up being leading to a combination of five numbers. That was a lot more of medical documentation, different kinds of medical documentation. In terms of distractors, the other thing I learned when I did research was the two types of ways you can have a beneficial distractor is if it is a very obvious red herring and that can be like this clearly, usually what it is, is like faux treasure. Yeah. Like you open a chest and it's full of coins, but you can't, you obviously can't do anything with the coins, but you see that there's a piece of a statue and you're like, that's the thing I need. Who cares about the treasure? Right? You throw away the jewels and the coins because you just want this one piece of a pyramid that or, you know, something that very obviously is just backdrop, like this is a lamp, nothing about the lamp. There's no color coding. There's no letters. Nothing. So, so those were, whenever I was thinking about what is going to do heavy lifting and what is not, I tried to make sure that there was a clear indication and code or visual cue that it was part of the puzzle. Sure. One of the things we were worried about actually was that in the escape room, you can just bundle all the papers together because you can wander around, get every single piece of paper and then shove it into a pile. But each of those pieces of paper is for a different puzzle. Yeah. Right. Even though they relate to the same patient and so especially the journal entries, I was really worried people would go, these are from the same book, put them all together and then they're not going to be able to find the right stuff. They're not going to remember like these were on the desk, these were over in the cabinet. Sure. So, we color coded them. Okay. In other words, color coded, any documentation that were related to that puzzle. So then like her diary had the same rose stationary, but it was blue, yellow, and purple rose. And then the invoices, the purple was the social determinants of health. So the invoices and the estimates and any like document, medical documentation that related to that puzzle was also purple, had like purple, logo and header or whatever. So that was also, and we then of course, if we use that to indicate it was part of the puzzle, we had to make sure that the other things around the room were not the same purple, the same blue, the same yellow. Yeah. So it didn't end up being a misfire. So this is a meta element principally for players, but I also imagine it helps with the to reset. Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. Is that something you had to carry through to the digital version as well, the color coded? I decided to. It's not as much of an issue with the digital because you can't, we didn't, we were not able, one of the things about Storyline, you can have an inventory system. It does not work the same way that you can make one in Unreal or Unity. Yeah. It's more a, this exists enough in a pocket and it's just, do you show that it's in your pocket or not? Like do you, you know, press reveal? And there's so much stuff that what we decided to do is we had you be able to go to the documentation in the room and be able to pull it up and read it and then you leave it there. So you always can go back to it. You can always go back to the room and read it. And because it's in one room where you just pivot around, we figured, okay, that's, that is safe enough and that's close enough that it may be a little annoying, but it's not as annoying as having to go across the entire house and find it again. Yeah. Because you can usually pretty much always see it. We decided to do that. And because of that, because they always lived in the same spot and there was no way for you to pick it up, we didn't necessarily have to worry about that. We kept the color coding because all the documents were already, all of the PNG files for those documents were already color coded. Sure. Yeah. So we did add the color coding to the lock just to make sure that especially if they were slightly spread out, that it was just that extra little bit of like this one belongs to this. Yeah. It was already incorporated. It wasn't just to solve a particular problem. You then use that as to leverage it into the design. So it maybe wasn't the problem didn't exist in the digital version, but it was now part of the design. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And that's something, I mean, I think if we had started with digital first, that would have been a kind of lift that would not have been as high priority and would have been a nice to have the fact that it was necessary for the escape room and that we got to have that little nice to have built in. It was a lot lighter lift, although apparently it took a long time to figure out how to get the paint splatters to show up on the lock. Just the use. These were not cooperating. It works, but apparently it took way longer than he thought it was going to take. I know. But it was only for the locks, thankfully, not that everything else had already been taken care of. That's good. That's good. That's funny. So I'm imagining an alternate scenario where you start with the digital version first and then bring it to an in because it sounds that would sound like a greater challenge. I suppose with the experience of knowing what you could imagine of this is going to be a problem on the floor, but you don't necessarily know that right away, this wasn't a choice you made which wanted to do first. But if you had the choice, would you have chosen to do it this way? I would have still started with the in-person escape room, I think, because the power of doing it in digital is you can do so many other cool things because it doesn't have to literally work. Yeah. One of the ideas we had for the final puzzle involved, reflecting lasers or something to get into the right hole or something to do with light and just the amount of iteration we would have had to do for that in-person to make sure that it didn't result in false positives or false negatives just would have been a lot. But we can do that in the digital space because we get to say where the laser goes. And we only are letting them rotate or add things so many degrees or so many pieces. I think that it would have been, it would have been a bummer because I feel like certain things that we would have gotten really excited about in the digital space we would have had to cheapen or it would have taken so much more thought to make it physically possible. And there's also an amount of just what skill do you have? Do you have someone available who can do that kind of manufacturing for an in-person escape room? Or are you relying on pre-made stuff which is either expensive or not quite thematically what you want or just have the right look or the feel? I think that that would have resulted in a lot more, it just would, a lot more instance where it's like, oh man, that's a bummer but what can you do? Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure. A grounded experience as well and I think that like having an escape room that translates a lot of the physical parts of it into digital says something to players that like this used to be, or it feels a little bit more, well I said grounded, I think that's the right term. Grounded. Yeah. It feels like part of the actual physical world. Yeah, it more familiar either literally to the escape room you did in person or like familiar to something that you actually could expect it to be more intuitive. Yeah, yes. The interaction with the game becomes more intuitive if it's grounded like you said Steven. I've definitely played some point in quick games where like you kind of just lose the immersion because it's no longer, you can no longer imagine yourself doing that but of course digitally you can click there, right? When that happens it's very jarring. So I guess would it be like a useful practice if you were designing a digital only escape room to kind of imagine those constraints and impose them upon yourself because the opposite thing also happened when you did the in person one first which is you had to consider the limitations of the development tool. Yeah. Yeah, it sounded like that. You took care of that relatively quickly and made it the adaptations you needed to. But say you were only in the digital space and say you did have a fully capable development tool. Would you feel a little bit undirected like the strains ultimately like in terms of the whole package it definitely was but imagine there was no real version. Would you imagine there are things you couldn't have done or did it actually make it a better version to have those constraints. I think it made it a better version to have those constraints. I think what difficulties there would be if we went one way or the other is that it is a lot easier to make puzzles in person because you already very much have the chance to look at the space and go or look at a bunch of stuff on a table and move them around and go what's here. Yeah. I think that there's also like you can bring the cipher or the information you need to the lock and being able to implement that affordance adds a lot of dev time and adds a lot of scope and if you can't handle it that's a problem. That is I wonder if the puzzle making would have been the one place where I would have felt a lot more free if I had started digitally. Sure. I think that that's the one thing where I think we did have to think a lot about mental load and working memory, how much are you remembering. I mean it's pretty traditional for that genre to play with a pad and pen next to you. Do we want to assume that someone will do that? Do we want to assume that we are making it hard enough that that's required or are there ways we can do that. Especially for a 20 minute experience. Oh yeah. Yeah. I feel like that related and I forgot what the main point was. Well you were saying the constraints ultimately improved the product in the end. Yeah. But it sounds like there were. It sounded like at the margins there were things it impeded but holistically you'll take those trade offs. Yeah. A hundred percent. I think that it made a better experience. I think that there's a lot of freedom and you can do anything but it's really hard then to figure out what your consistent theme and how you're going to ground it. What is the theme? What are the languages? What are the premises? What is going to be your given and your space? You have to eventually bound it in and having to make all of those decisions for me is a lot personally. I like knowing okay it's going to be roughly in this space has to be roughly on this theme because then I can go all right well let's see we needed a certain variety of puzzles. What sorts of stuff would make sense in this room? That's for me also why I really like narrative because it can make it a lot more cohesive because you can say oh yeah we can totally have that because it would make sense for her to have this in her house. But also if you're thinking about if you need like a bunch of keys what and do you want to have a lock that is related to the keychain design? Well where would you keep the keys? My answer is on a hook by the door because that's where you like put your keys either before or end of day and then what type of keychains will she have? Well she's in Massachusetts. Let's find a bunch of Massachusetts keychains and then that then says okay well how many different Massachusetts keychains can I think of that are distinct? And then that tells you how many distractors or how many possibilities in the room that then you have to follow through. That is a lot better than all right I guess it's a star and then maybe it's a steam engine and maybe some sushi because you could just do anything you could just model it or find it in the Unity store but will it make sense? No not necessarily. Sometimes you just need something there but if you want to have a sense of okay this can stay this way it's a lot easier to have that solid theme. In order to avoid the panic that comes with everything being everything you have to put boundaries up so then you can make sense of things. Well as you've described you have to sort of stitch it all together. It can't just be separate components we've talked about on the show before like you know mechanics versus theme and like the trouble with like the board game industry where those things tend to just live on their own separately and like they don't melt together but when you're forced to work on them both at the same time you kind of like it's just a natural process right it's not something you need to force yourself to do necessarily. And it sounds like what I did also try to find some documentation on designers and developers of escape rooms and one of the things that I remember reading that was very much on this theme is they said choose your puzzles and your set pieces on the theme of your escape room. If you're in Dracula's castle there's probably not going to be a QR code scanner. Right. So like but if you have a bunch of QR code puzzles that might make sense for like a CEO's penthouse suite but and so then it's that I'm just thinking about okay well what locks are going to be in a CEO suite versus in Dracula's castle we're going big chunky metal locks for Dracula maybe some combination locks but then as far as the CEO like a retina scanner or a fingerprint scanner or like some form of code or a safe or a wall safe behind a picture. Maybe Dracula has that too but they're going to look like different safes right that also tells you if you're going to do if you want to have like a combination puzzle that then tells you what that lock is going you have a better sense of what that lock is going to be. Right. Right. It also allows you to communicate with ironies so if you have the retinal scanner and like behind a book is in Dracula's castle that's really interesting yeah that means something now. Yeah. That means like you know it just if you've lived for a long time you have your favorite things but then you might get that one piece of technology that you're super super into. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Dracula's Dracula loves his old school locks but is really into Sam's on galaxy phones. I feel like he would probably be really down to 3D printing because he doesn't have to worry about ventilation and he could make all his favorite Victorian things that died long ago because and were forgotten to time if you can make the 3D file he can print his new versions of those. Yeah but then they're like weird little plastic versions of it and I kind of love the idea of just Dracula. We have to make another game. Yeah. Now Dracula's in the blender. Yeah. I still haven't done a game. Game jam. Gotta do that today. Global game jams coming up. You don't know what game you're going to make and you don't know what the theme's going to be but it's going to be Dracula and it's going to have 3D printing. We also have that horror game about which which makes use of like automatic lighting and stuff that we talked about last time we met in person. Yeah. Yeah. So many games today. No. So many jobs. Invite me. Invite me to game jam. Game jam. Please. Well okay. Well we're going to record one more episode today. Do you want to make it a nice games jam and would you like to join us? It'd be fun. Let's do it. Yeah. Listen to her tune in next week. Lydia's going to design a game with us. Great. Yay. Exciting. It's happening. Yay. Thank you for having me. Well I mean before we get to all that. Thanks for coming on. It's great to see it's good to have you here in the clubhouse. And man, so much to chew on I think. We've been on this like puzzle tear in our interview episodes lately. Yeah. Puzzles are great. I love puzzles. And this is like this is feels like a piece of that way that we've been missing up to now. So it's really good. Yeah. I hope I suspect listeners will get a lot from it. I'm really excited to do what you're doing. So thanks for sharing your experience. I'm really excited to. There's a build I can play now. I know. You guys can't play. It's also have any critical bugs anymore. Yay. Stone high five. Okay. That's our show. You can find Lydia online on LinkedIn. For show notes and additional links from today's conversation, go to our website, NiceGames.club. This is Zina. Interesting. I haven't seen Dale in a while. Okay. Reply there on threads or email us. Contact at NiceGames.club. Nice Games Club is on Patreon. Support the show and good stuff, including ad free episodes. Sign up at patreon.com/nicegamesclub. And if you want to keep things more casual, just stop by NiceGames.club/discord and say hello. Next week, well, we're going to be doing a game jam. So tune in. But that's it for this week. Until we start again, remember to play Nice and Make Nice. With the cold weather incoming, what's the obvious choice for a backyard upgrade? Hint, it's a solo stove. Solo stoves are smokeless, and that's not blowing smoke. With the patented design with signature 360 degree airflow technology to feed the flames and burn off smoke before it gets into your hair or clothes. Create the perfect atmosphere this fall. With over 222,000 five star reviews, solo stove is the ultimate fire pit. Just ask new dog. With countless sizes, there's a solo stove for every backyard. From tabletop fire pits to pizza ovens, and even fire pits designed to sit eight plus people. There's something for everyone. With the lifetime warranty, enjoy the comfort of your 100% stainless steel fire pit without the worry of it breaking. Solo stoves are built to last, not just for the season, but forever. Get yours now at solo stove.com. [BLANK_AUDIO]
All of your hosts are together in the Clubhouse for a special interview! Lydia Symchych is an impact game designer who has been working with Ellen over the last year. Today, she shares her experience of making an escape room that needed to be rendered in both "physical" and and digital environments. Also, sound effects and pillows.
In the USA, November 28th is Thanksgiving Day, and November 29th is National Native American Heritage Day. Happy holidays, if you're in the USA—and if you're not, we hope you have something to be thankful for. 💖