Next-Gen's Next Steps
Calvin KammerThe tragedy at Caneen is a hit!
Caves of Caneen has been out for about a month now and has enjoyed the record best opening out of any of our escape rooms! More players have played our newest game than any other before.
Thanks to everyone who played in our opening month!
To celebrate, I just released Caneen’s official soundtrack available for streaming on YouTube! Enjoy it while you read this blog, or bust it out at your next game night for an hour of ambience.
Our previous location’s record first month was ClauseQuest. The holiday game did exceptionally well when we opened it in November of 2023, with 175 players in it’s opening month. Caneen’s first month has seen 195 players! We are well on track to beat the living daylight out of Santa’s record.
What's next?
Now that Caneen is open and some of our staff can be called back to run sessions my attention turns to the next room, what was going to be called Crypt of the Vampire!
For a million reasons I can’t get into without boring you to death, we changed the name to Vampire Crypt.
This has come with a slight change to the scope, mood, and setting of the room. Right now we are effectively running the business like Grommit lays track until we have sufficient bookings to keep our heads above water.
If we weren’t in this mode, I’d have more time to write more blogs and trully enjoy the process of game design. As it stands, we have to make our rooms work with what we have; a limited budget, props leftover from location 1, and a December rush deadline. Doing the math real quick tabulates to: we need to get another experience for players quick. All the while understanding that we have to still deliver a new compelling experience the first time this game is played!
Five separate times since opening we’ve had to tell callers we don’t have the capacity for their group! A second room will hopefully fix a lot of our problems with reopening. Cash flow is limited when you have a single game to sell. Thankfully more players seem interested in playing at our new location simply because we are there, not necessarily because of the theme. I infer that more games means more players means better cash flow means more relaxed game designer means happy times for everyone.
I have the new page for Vampire Crypt set up now, and it doesn’t exactly tell you on the homepage that the game is coming soon. This is very deliberate: it’s good for me to know early on if a certain game will be popular. While players can’t book, I can track general interest in the room. Ideally adding more games increases the number of players we entertain in a day, but that might not be the case. It may be that we only have an interest from 195 players a month in our location. This is a morbid thought as the business owner; it’s not enough to live off of. Hopefully the cool new theming brings in even more players, and our increased capacity means we can host more!
A metaphor that comes to mind is building more dams to capture more water. In theory it makes sense, but only if you can count on there being enough rain to justify the dams.
So the new room needs to go up fast. We had some solid electronic puzzles from Kingskeep which can be reused or remastered using original props. The goal would be to make it so that if an electronic puzzle (which are typically the crowd pleasers and are by far the most complex for us to create) is used from the first location it’s presented in a new way returning players would appreciate. Either a tip of the hat to a former puzzle as seen in Caneen, or using the prop in a totally new way. We can get away with having cool electronic puzzles on the room’s opening day, and reimplement our favorite stuff from the old location. Plan sounds like a winner to me!
The walls are already up! These are the former walls from Kingskeep. They’ve held up well over the years, and with some light touch-ups they should be as good as new.
As of now the game is designed, the set is done! All we need to do is implement the puzzles as designed and we are well on our way to having a completed escape room. Knock on wood we are aiming for the beginning of December so we can benefit from a holiday rush, we kinda need it at this point.
What could have been: Vampirates
Though it pains me to write this, the room is about a hundred times less zany than when my wife and I first came up with it. It wasn’t just a vampire’s crypt you see, the family had a habit of piracy. They were vampirates.
Oh what we could have had if I didn’t want to make it cool. But, alas, I believe that if you try to sell people on a cool gothic vampire setting you ought to deliver on that setting. It should be cool like Hugh Jackman’s Van Helsing (campy classic), not wild like What we do in the Shadows. But, the changes didn’t end there. For you have to understand, it wouldn’t just be a vampirate room, it would be a crypt for a vampiRATe. As in rat, like a rodent. An undead rodent swashbuckler. Oh what could have been.
But why not cast caution to the wind and tell the stories that I REALLY want to tell? It's my game after all!
Unfortunately when we do things against the grain it feels like we suffer as a business. Doing really weird stuff is great if you have the marketing chops like meow wolf, but I don’t have that talent yet. A great example is our first escape room, and a hill I will always die on. It was called Global National, based on a fictional office of the same namesake. Global National is an oxymoron, further illustrated with the tagline A local company. I’m not convinced a single person ever understood what I was going for!
From what I can tell the players that support Next-Gen would prefer a novel experience that isn’t undercut by a joke. Players have laughed at the little jokes I hid here and there in the game, but no one has ever booked with us because we are the comedy escape room. Eventually we had changed that room into a 2.0 version and renamed it to Bomb Threat. I think that name was a lot more digestible to players, and directly informed players what they were signing up for as opposed to our other escape rooms. After the name change we saw a dramatic increase in bookings with the room.
Coming up I'll be writing several posts about the Crypt's story, set, and game design all leading up to it's release date!
