Tick... Tock... Tick.
We are less than a week away from closing our first escape room location. Nerves are high and tensions are tight. We are less than a week away from revenue and our staff having hours. To add to the hectic fun we are having there has been a change of plan with how we want to roll out our new location.
As it looks like we are staring at the light at the end of the tunnel we are making a slight course correction. Our first escape room isn’t exactly close to being done, and our bank account is starting to worry me. On top of it, we are running out of time, and there will inevitably be a small time frame where we do not make any income.
My hope is to get to open asap so our staff can work again. Several of them have had to take on second jobs which means they will have less time at the new escape room. Not sure if it’s a curse of having a fun/flexible job but the moment a slightly more demanding position is taken we inevitably start getting 2 week notices. I’m hoping the new place will have such a demand that we can have staff on regular schedules rather than the pseudo regular schedule our staff know now. This would mean more reliably high hours for all our staff, and gets us closer to offering salaried positions.
Now, our priority is to open our doors by nearly any means necessary. Previously we had wanted to open our new location with our new room, Tales in the Bloated Toad. A ton of design work had been done, and the first of the props and set pieces were just coming together. I had also written a few blogs about the design of the room. I am jazzed to get back to creating that experience soon. For now our plan is not to open with an entirely new experience and hope it’s a hit, but use already successful escape games as a foundation for our new location to get started.
Light in the tunnel
We are planning to move King’s Keep, Clancey’s Lodge, and ClauseQuest to our new location. These are our fan-favorite escape rooms, and with some light updates they can be well-tuned rooms for the new location. These will mostly be the same games as our previous location, except with a fresh paint job, tuned puzzles, and an entirely new set to boot. At this point I do not think players who have played these games previously will get a ton of value by replaying them here. At the end of the day they will mostly be similar puzzles to the previous location. This may change based on feedback, but I feel like ultimately the idea here is to open our doors fast with our heavy hitters and then roll out our new escape rooms once things are a little less hectic for us.
Our heavy hitters should pack a punch for our soft opening!
A grand opening will be planned for when we have all five game rooms open! These three rooms we are transferring are not considered in a beta stage since we can kind of look at all of Next-Gen 1 as a beta for this location.
In short, we are postponing releasing Tales in the Bloated Toad, and instead are prioritizing moving King's Keep, Clancey's Lodge, and ClauseQuest.
Here’s the ultimate reasons behind our decision:
Starting with fresh games means all the recognition our rooms have will be nonexistent. King’s Keep was twice nominated for TERPCA’s Best Global Escape Room! These are our most popular rooms, and players know them. Because of this, they get played more and talked about more among our fans. It would be a shame to toss all that recognition in the bin for the sake of new.
We thought about selling our games, or even just the puzzles. if we sold it piecemeal it wouldn’t have the same charm. Decided that from these rooms they are far more valuable being kept together in one package than being sold. Also, there comes extra effort in selling a ton of items while closing a location and opening another!
We can create the walls and sets for our upcoming rooms early and use them for these rooms. Set design is one of our favorite steps in the process, and pays off tremendously when we get the detail right. Luckily, with a slight tweak to the theme and story of the rooms they can easily fit into a set that can be reused for our future game plans. For example, Clancey’s Lodge will no longer be in a cabin, but a cave-like system.
Also, set design is one of the faster parts of the escape room process for us. (If anyone is wondering about the longest; it’s coding+troubleshooting.) So far we are nearly complete with the building of the walls, then we need to dress the set up and transfer the game. Clancey’s replacement should be up fast.
We get to do the v1.5 treatment to the rooms and see their potential at what I think is a far better location. There's a chance to do some updates to puzzles we’ve never had a good excuse for, and show them to new players in North Fresno. Our first escape room, Global National, went through an update that changed so significantly much players could come back to replay the game. While my ambition tells me to give these the same treatment, time is crunching away even as I type this. If we can have the time it seems like a good move to have a way to invite our previous players back.
Clanceys Lodge and ClauseQuest in particular will be supremely easy to move over, and will take less than a week to install and upgrade. Kind of a no brainer here on this end. King’s Keep will be slightly different, and more difficult. Certain special effects may not survive the journey over, which is unfortunate as I feel they are entirely necessary to get the whole experience. We may need to have a different way to deliver the effects without it becoming too a-door-able. Fingers crossed we can reuse and reapply the walls from King’s Keep at the new location. It would save us a ton of time and money, and they still look great after 4 years of use! There is a question of how easy it will be to take down the walls without destroying them, but the crew at CleVR Escape in Visalia was able to do it so we should have a fair chance.
Updating the booking platform will be easier with ready-to-go rooms. Change can be difficult, so we wanted this part to be as easy as possible for us and our guests. The booking platform we are moving to has a ton of features included which will be sure to make the escape room experience better than at our previous location. The top feature being integration with Chromecasting so we can cast displays onto TV screens in the room. Our previous location contained zero non-puzzle-related TVs other than ClauseQuest. It was our ambition to open an escape room that didn’t use a TV for clues and time tracking, as it was my observation that they are hardly ever implemented immersively in the room. Any sort of UI on the screen would surely take away from the experience, and why would I want a TV in my medieval dungeon?! But alas, we have found a rich compromise in the form of embedding the TV into the set! Kia and I had played an escape room during our honeymoon which had actually embedded the TV into the set to make it a seamless part of the experience.
Now as I’m older I realize it’s not the worst thing in the world to read clues off a smartly used TV screen. As long as the final implementation of the screens look and feel like a part of the escape room with sounds and video this will be an awesome effect that is no-where else in the area is doing.
That was a lot to say just to say we are now opening with some familiar favorites before rolling out completely new experiences. I do not know when we will have our soft opening of the new location; we must first close the previous location, move or sell all the items there, and then circle back to opening. It’s extremely hard to say exactly when we can greet guests again, my gut wants to say October 1st, but I have a feeling life always finds a way to add bumps to the road.
Thanks for reading and stopping by! Some time soon I will hopefully have some exciting new about our opening date, and eventually I'll go over the changes we’ll be doing to Clancey’s and King’s!
