Designing the set for Caves of Caneen

It’s been a few months since Caneen has released, and as soon as it was being played we had to move onto the next room! That’s how it seems to go in this line of business, sometimes we can get caught up on building for the future rather than taking the time to reflect on what we’ve built so far!

Caneen is a prime example of this, and I’m glad to finally have time to talk a little more about the game now that it’s been out for a few months.

The set is honestly awesome. Its crazy to compare it to our old set of Kingskeep and see just how far we’ve come in 5 years of making these games. Game design aside, I think the two rooms we have created are the most visually impressive spaces in the central valley. There are a few tweaks I want to make to the set, but that is usually an ongoing problem. Once I fix something up to where I like it there's something new that takes priority!

The walls themselves took an immense amount of time to get done. Each wall has a layer of drywall holding it up with sometimes several layers of foam sheets on top. We had been collecting styrofoam from packages we’ve purchased for projects over the years and had a wide variety to choose from. Everything else we needed for the room was supplemented with insulation foam sheets from the hardware place down the street. This was a process. Each sheet had a thin layer of paper for product information which was no beuno for us. For contractors they don’t care who sees the foam, but for us it was detrimental! It took HOURS to clean off all the sheets we needed. Then each layer of foam was carefully measured, cut, and placed onto the wall to fill the space with enough breaks to where it would never look uniform. It looks rather organic!

Each sheet was adhered using wood glue (vegan) then reinforced with a drywall screw to lock it in place. We placed the layers at different heights with it generally being thicker closer to the top of the 10’ tall room and in corners to give it a subtle vignette look. Then we got wild with a corner sander and attacked the walls in various ways and angles. I think I learned my lesson with them, as we burnt through two different inexpensive tools until the third and slightly higher quality sander lasted us to the end. It came at a cost, but the view is definitely worth it.

We wanted the walls to appear damaged by pickaxes, some at different times, heights, and intensity to reflect that there are a number of species from fantasy working on the mines. Mostly dwarves, hence the name Company of the Free Dwarves present in the game, but there would also be some humans, ogres, and halflings. I hope the variety came out in the walls, but it may be hard to tell for first time players more focussed on the game rather than the set.

The walls were painted with a swatch of three different colours. A light umber, dark umber, and a grayish umber. IDK if im using umber right but it feels right. Each color was applied using seasponge (nonvegan) that we’ve been using for the past 5 years for projects like this. Each sponge was lightly dabbed in a pool of paint, sometimes mixed together, then lightly applied to the wall in a non-uniform, random pattern. This was done to nearly every square inch all eight walls of the two rooms, and was super time consuming. Then we added two more layers of color on top of everything else. When I tell players it was a timely process I don’t think they realize what I meant!  Some areas are biased to darker colors, but the lighter areas with a more beige tone seem to look the best! If we were to paint it all over again I think we would have more of these lighter tones cut through more by applying more of those coats throughout the paint process.

The materials used in the room are almost all parts from our previous rooms.

The room has a wood beam that came straight out of King’s Keep and covers a load-bearing pole in the direct center of the business. This is extremely mundane, but this pole is technically the cornerstone of our entire operation as it dictated how large our center hallway could be, thus dictating how large our escape rooms can be. It’s far better to work with your environment than work around it. Now there is a “load-bearing” wood beam in the room that looks exactly in place in a mine, and gives the room slightly more dressing where there would be none.

The door that leads into the second room was made using recovered materials from Clancey’s Lodge. A fitting use, as Caneen started off as a remaster of the Lodge but grew into it’s own thing rather quickly. The door uses panels from Clancey’s walls, and is backed with the frame of the original door! It’s rather a Frankenstein's monster of a project to get into with a brief blog, but the door now has the creaks, the moans, and the groans that we’ve always wanted to see from a secret door entrance. 

Now with our hint system being tied to a TV we’ve had to include them in all of our upcoming games. This was something I resisted for a while for various reasons but now as the business is starting to mature something had to give. So we added TV monitors in the rooms to track time and deliver hints but wanted them to be a bit more thematic/immersive so we embedded them into the walls. For Caneen we added a wooden frame around the monitor and chose a background images that would suggest a much larger and expansive mine. It’s at a weird angle, and the space is far to small for anyone to “use” this tunnel, but this is a fantasy world so Halfling accessible entrances are going to be the norm where we need it lol.

Lighting in the rooms are a huge point of focus for us. Unlike at our previous location we have complete control over the lighting in the rooms now. No theres no more ugly fluorescents that drown colors out like its the backrooms! Each room has RGB LED lights that can be adjusted on the fly. It gives us greater control over the color palate of the room which makes prop making and set design so much easier when we can rapidly test what something looks like in the intended environment. Also, for groups that request the lights to be less immersive or muted we can adjust the lights as needed so everyone that plays can have an accessible fun time! Caneen has a dark moonlight glow about it, to reflect how “dark” it is in the mine without actually turning down the lights!

The room would drown out in the RGB lights if they were the sole source of light in the room. As such, we added multiple desk lamps and overhanging bulbs that have a flicker flame effect. As players explore the room flames dance about the room in an extremely immersive way that light would naturally behave. To top this all off, if players aren’t satisfied with the ambient light in the room there are a number of thematic flashlights that can be discovered while playing. If anyone has a hard time seeing while their eyes adjust to the new lighting these torches are a godsend and add a layer of immersion to the game. Plus from a game design perspective the Game Masters can at a glance see where player’s attention is, which makes running the game all the easier.

That’s it for now about the set for Caneen, next time I’ll go into more detail about the Vampire Crypt! Thanks for reading! -Calvin