Where is Next-Gen at?

X=

It’s been a minute since I’ve written an update like this, excited to get back into it. I find it particularly hard to write short posts like these when I have a million things in life happens at once, but I remember getting a lot of value out of slowing down and taking stock as to where the business is at, and sharing whatever I may find interesting to share.

Here ya go math people:

(X-1477 E Shaw Ave) = (X+7718 N First Street)

Okay not the best math equation I’ve come up with, to be fair. The laziest one I’ve made, to be sure. Yep, we are moving from 1477 E Shaw Ave to 7718 N First Street, Fresno CA, 93720.

 

Catch you up to speed:

Currently my wife and I are moving our escape room business to a nice part of town, and have spent the last 6 weeks with contractors to build out the facility where my wife and I could not have done alone. We were given a ton of freedom with the buildout of this location, and that came with extreme costs, more so than we predicted when we first got the lease! But, so is life.

We wanted out of our current lease for a number of reasons:

1. The old landlord’s failure to uphold their lease agreement. Not fun to talk about or bring up.
2. Unfortunately homeless people have taking a liking to that lease, and it has lead to several safety issues leading up to an explosion which wiped out the internet for an entire neighborhood. The other leases on the property have a number of instances of people breaking in to sleep and eat out of refrigerators. Personally, I have been attacked by homeless people four times at this location and it has led to mental health issues which by extension harmed the business and my personal relationships. Don’t mean to get too real, but this was a real problem for me. The other two points are just to reassure me this was the right thing to do.

It's been a process moving.

We have been looking at locations to move to for the past two years, and in a brilliant if not desperate move, inquired about the location we landed on. Previously, we had worked with two other leasing agents to look at properties, but all of them lacked that certain X factor we look for in a good location. When the years we had to make a decision became months I started to get worried about finding the right spot, and started to look for just a spot that could work! This new lease we had seen for probably a year or so, but never inquired as it was formerly a dry cleaners and we assumed they were looking for more dry cleaners. We were in luck when they were interested in getting Fresno’s top escape room under their roof!

My silent business partner has been pushing us to look at buying a building instead of leasing. I totally understand the value, but lack the understanding of how to acquire such property. Either it’s old/dilapidated and therefore people won’t go there, or it’s valuable and therefore out of our budget. We could get a lot… somewhere in town (Fresno/Clovis/Sanger) and build up from there, but where?? I would think that building a building would be more costly than buying something still up, but surely if we have to demo the building to rebuild it would be cheaper to just get and empty lot!

There’s a lot on Herndon avenue, effectively one of the main streets of Clovis, with two old homes on it. One in the front that is in desperate need of filmed destruction, and the other is a house on some 2 acres in the middle of commercial development. Could be valuable, but would take a year or two before we could open, and I don’t know if that even includes permits. Maybe it’s an idea for down the road after this new location is well established. I’ve always loved the idea of “Next-Gen Land” WIP. For now it will have to remain a dream, as the window of opportunity to make that successful set sail on us for now. It would make no sense to not have games running at any point, we want our staff to get hours. Funnily enough about the few buildings we inquired about, all three of them were claimed to already have deals on the table, almost as if the deal is already done and us viewing the property is a formality. Coincidentally, all three were recommended to be demoed.  But as of today all three building are still standing, and still looking for a buyer, some two years later.

Promising new beginning:

The new location has a new ceiling up, with lights and walls nearly all to our specifications. We wanted to open with at least one game, and have it line up with our September 15th closing date of location 1. Unfortunately, that isn’t happening. Construction predictably took longer than predicted. We are fingers crossed we can hit an October 1st soft opening date with a room.

Rough sketch of roadmap:

1. Sep 15: Last day Location 1 is open
2. Oct 1: Soft open with Tales in the Bloated Toad
3. December 1: Soft open Crypt of the Vampire or Dragon Heist
4. January 1: Soft open Crypt of the Vampire or Dragon Heist
5. February 1: Soft open Fall of Kingskeep
6. March 1: Grand Opening+ Mystery Room

What’s a soft opening? It’s a period where we will have the game playable to the public in a complete form, though some elements are subject to change and malfunction as we learn more about how players interact with our rooms. Once we’ve hit the grand opening we will be confident that all the rooms we current have are exceptional, and close enough to the original vision of the room that any future additional changes will be minor.

This location will have a total of 4 escape rooms, with a special mystery room I’ll write more about later. Biggest takeaways about making escape rooms we learned from the various projects we’ve worked on:

1. Players love entering a new room.

1. 3 of the 4 escape rooms have multiple rooms. Tales in the Bloated Toad, our first game, is a singularly big room. With the space we had to work with, it would be better to have one more experience rather than a single game with 3 rooms. Alternatively, we could still plan to open up with 8 different escape games across our 8 different rooms. It would be extremely cost effective on our end, yet I have a feeling people won't like 8 single-room games!

2. It’s more fun when puzzles require two or more players to solve.

1. There’s shared excited when you get to share a win with someone else
2. Sorry Solo Escapers! Our games literally require two or more players to solve. If you’d like to try a solo escape, reach out to us personally ahead of time. We may need a Game Master to enter the rooms at various times to facilitate.

3. Theme is king

1. We had one room in particular do notable better than our others. We can’t shrug the feeling that it wasn’t much of a coincidence that it was also the room we worked on the longest and put the absolute most TLC in. Thus, we decided to make all the games at this location similarly themed, but each with their own subgenre. It would be a disservice to all the campy horror lovers of Clancey’s Lodge to not have a fun creature feature escape room in Fresno.

4. Lean into what we like

1. The lite storytelling elements seem to be what players like the most in our games. Instead of trying to tell a massive linear story, or a random puzzle-guess, we like to think we are aiming down the line. Not too linear to where it is boring, but not too random to where you can’t keep up.
2. The rooms together tell a semi-linear story. I’ve always liked the idea of a longer format of escape rooms, and this way we can explore the fantasy setting we are creating in new ways almost no other fandom can. While they are set in a medieval fantasy setting we created, each room has it’s own storyline and of course subgenre.

The rooms, and some quick things of note:

Tales in the Bloated Toad

1. The backroom of a popular tavern, a lighthearted experience similar to Bomb Threat. 
2. Tags: (Tavern, Funny, Repeatable, Starter)
3. Players: 2-8

Crypt of the Vampire

1. Chilling adventure into a decrepit mausoleum, creepy fun like in Clancey’s Lodge.
2. Tags: (Creepy, Atmospheric, Magick, Bizarre)
3. Players: 2-6

Dragon’s Quest

1. An epic quest into the lair of the beast, traditional adventure for roleplayers.
2. Tags: (Adventure, Epic, Quest, Dragon)
3. Players 2-6

Fall of Kingskeep

1. A tale of the royal family betraying you at the worst possible time, a rebellion threatens the throne room. Most similar to Kings Keep. 
2. Tags: (Throne, Castle, War, Royalty)
3. Players 2-8

Mystery Room

1. Something new where we can create and tell stories in a new way.
2. Options will eventually include rentable escape rooms in a box, which are the evolution of our mobile Escape Crates. These products are rented out at a flat-rate, and are played onsite at Next-Gen. Great for getting new players in, or larger groups on a budget. Escape room enthusiasts should enjoy being able to play a multitude more escape games at our location. Though we have 4 escape rooms, we can have many more Escape Crates available onsite. These will vary in time/length, and will be a good option for players looking to play multiple escape rooms in one go.
3. Players 2-8

And with that, I have run out of writing chutzpah. Coming up, I’ll write more about each room and more perks about the new location that I’m falling for (don’t tell Kiara), how we’ve used AI for the escape room, and probably more topics. 

Thanks for reading!

-Calvin