Davis Rewind - A Digital Escape Room Experience

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Duration: 3 months

Role: Designer, Researcher, Developer, Puzzle Designer

Team: 2 people

Overview

To commemorate the centennial anniversary of the city of Davis, we designed and developed a digital escape room tailored specifically for the educational enrichment of Davis high school students. This interactive learning experience drew inspiration from the intricate design of a bronze seal created by Susan Shelton. Our objective was to provide a comprehensive and engaging platform that not only celebrated the city's rich history, from the native Patwin tribe to present day, but also facilitated a dynamic and immersive educational journey for its young learners.

Research

As we started this project, we researched the user and the bronze seal. For the seal, we looked into the inspirations of the seal designs. This took us into the history of Davis and the history of the Patwin people (taken from the website of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Tribe).

For the users, we were required to tie this in with local history units at the schools, so our target audience could either be middle school or high school students. Based on their respective curriculum and the information from our background research, we focused our game on high school students.

Design

We drew visual inspiration from various examples from the“best of” section on the Awwwards website. For game design and flow, we took inspiration from The Hogwarts Escape, a digital Harry Potter themed escape room and Junior Ranger Interactive Activities from the National Park Service.  

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Storyboards were then created to understand the flow and structure of the website. We did two rounds of peer testing here. Key feedback was to change the hint system, and to slow down the auto-transition.

The concept of the game was as follows: Each puzzle was inspired by a slice of the seal. The puzzles discussed the past and present of Davis, and alluded to the future. Every puzzle came with a background image, generated by Midjourney AI, that referenced the theme.

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Version 1:

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All text content went up. Care went into choosing the order and difficulty of puzzles, so that our players would not abandon the game.

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Version 2:

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Game transitions are successful, and layout is decided. With some design improvements, we performed user tests. All our testers struggled and breezed through the same puzzles. The students enjoyed the game, and it was clear that the puzzles were the right level of difficulty.  Our peers recommended making the instruction panel easier to read, and to improve the visual hierarchy.

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Current Version:

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The game works smoothly, and all the puzzles are in place. Due to the timeline moving up for unexpected reasons, there are two puzzles whose assets we were never able to complete.
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Find the website here. I hope you have fun playing the game, and learning the history of a small town in Northern California.

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