Unit 7: Escape Room

Concept

Escape Andy’s Bedroom is an escape room inspired by “Buzz lightyear to the rescue”. You play as Buzz in hopes of escaping Andy’s bedroom. Which will be inspired from “Buzz Lightyear to the rescue” but in a more modern style I will also be adding the escape room mechanics making it a original game.

Research

An escape room is where a player has a set amount of time to escape. The room is normally locked and have to solve a series of puzzles which the player has to complete.

An escape room is often popular of the experience it provides. The experience they provide is a story driven game with pressure from the countdown and will give the player as sense of achievement as it puts quick thinking on the line. Having puzzles gate keeping the progression can lead the player to make mistakes as they try to rush in order to beat the time. Same mechanics are needed to unlocked other mechanics causing the game to make a particular order of events.

Games within the genre

What are the similarities

Both games contain entities which pressures the player further as if they get caught they will die. They also both contain large levels making the player feel enclosed to their enviourment. They both feature psychological horror because of jump scares. The game is quiet at certain points keeping the player on edge as they expect something to happen but nothing does.

Differences

Whereas the backrooms have many entities granny only having the one therefore, with less entries the player knows what to look out for. The backrooms uses a blend between entries and enviourment as the space itself could be horror due to the audio and sounds around you. Granny has only one enemy meaning it can be predictable at times.

What I want in mine

I want the idea of granny that it is one large enviourment instead of many levels like the backrooms. However, mine will be smaller than granny’s house as I don’t think I will have enough time to do all of Andy’s house. I will also not being having a entity like granny or backrooms this is because I want to prioritise the the mechanics first with atmosphere supporting.

How am I going to meet my goals

In order to meet the mechanics first with atmosphere supporting I will want the enviourment to feel much larger than the player as you play as Buzz lightyear who is a toy so the enviourment is suppose to feel engulfing. I will do the mechanics first as they are important and will meet the requirements first.

Platform

	Recommended	Minimum
CPU	I5 10th gen	Intel I3 6th gen
GPU	GTX 1650	GTX 1060
RAM	16GB	8GB
OS	Windows 11	Windows 7

This game will be aimed at PC with these specs. This is because the game will not be graphically intense. This is because there won’t be a lot that will be rendered on one screen and the gameplay mechanics are very simple to make and therefore, will not put a lot of strain on the PC.

Gameplay

In the brief requirements featuring a timer and 3 puzzle designs. This can be to my liking with no other restraints other than this. This means I can think out the box for my mechanics as I plan on including never seen before and something new to bring to the table.

Story

The story of the escape room is that Andy going on holiday and forgot his toys. You play as Buzz light year to escape his bedroom and go inside of his suitcase. To get out of his bedroom you need to find the spere key in order to unlock the bedroom door. To find the key you need to complete puzzles in order to reach it.

Mechanics

Shooting – This gives the player the ability to shoot. This shooting mechanic will be buzz lightyear laser. This will make the player feel more like Buzz lightyear. The way I plan on adding this functionality is that you shoot 2 points of Molly’s cot which will then drop the cot wall so then you can walk out of it.

Keypad – This is going to be a safe in Andy Room which isn’t cannon but will be a feature within the game. This will have a simple passcode which will unlock the safe and inside will be a battery which will power RC which will help in the next puzzle.

RC – Once you have found RC you can take posses him and go on the hot wheel tracks which will allow you to knock some books which buzz can’t reach once those books are knocked it will launch buzz into the air in order to reach the key.

Countdown – This gives the player a certain about of space time in order to win the game that creates the sense of pressure and tension this creates a psychology effect causing the player to have to make quick choices. As a design choice instead of making it a UI I want to make it so there is a clock on Andy bedside table which will update every second counting down which I think will add a cool creative twist to the countdown.

Player input

Visual

Toy Story 2 Reassembled is a fan made project by Level reDesign this is where my project takes heavy inspiration from. This is because this is was recommended to me whist doing some researching and I thought it was pretty cool.

Level Design

The layout of the escape room important because you need to make sure that it not too easy or hard for the player. You also need to make sure that the scaling is good because you don’t want your player to be bigger than the map for example.

The layout of the escape room is based on Andy’s bedroom from Toy Story “Buzz Lightyear to the rescue ” thanks to a modding kit by mouksx I managed to get the block out layout done very easy as I can see the sizing of objects. However, I will be focusing on the bedroom of Andy.

Production

Gameplay

To being my production I wanted to focus on the game play elements this is because I want to set the core mechanics done. In order to do this I will be trying to do some of it independently.

In the industry constant casting is bad this is cast nodes create references which means increased memory consumption and instant industry they use alternative ways of doing this such as interacts or getting the actor themselves.

Shooting

Duplicated for sphere 1 and 2 which makes a bool set to true which is check in the event. It also fires the event but if it is false it won’t do anything.

Fires a event that checks to see if the spheres have been destroyed and if true then it will play the time line and change the dot door Z position.

For my shooting I decided to prototype the the system this is going to be the first prototype system therefore, it doesn’t have full working capability such as shooting. Due to animations and VFX I struggled getting the fully working on to look the way as I intended and due to how fast the deadline is approaching I have decided to leave it like this. This is a fully original system made by me and was very simple to make.

Keypad

For the keypad I decided to use a tutorial for the convince this is because it is a very common in escape room and by exploring tutorials I don’t just rely on my own knowledge but get to see how the industry.

I managed to make a cube appear and disappear within the hand if the pin is correct this is to represent the battery which will be given to RC. I also added keyboard input to the interact. The UI was made by Josh however, will be changed in the UI section

RC

RC won’t be the same as the one in the show this is because that would require rigging a car and working with unreal engine chaos systems. This would take a lot of time and as my time is going by I will have to start taking shortcuts in order to complete the work.

This is another system which I decided to try and do by myself which ended up working very well but did have to do a lot of debugging and troubleshooting in order to get my game to work.

This is in the third person blueprint it looks for 2 actors which have certain bools assigned for them in order to work. It then posses the car and changes the input into the car and hides the battery for RC and you can now control RC.

This does the opposite to the blueprint above if E is pressed then it puts you back into buzz in order to do this I had to remove the RC input and add the player input again.

Countdown

The countdown will be a clock that is placed on the bedside table instead of using a widget. This is a design choice as I think it would fit more with the theme. I will be using a seven segment clock system. This does need a mesh which will be made in the modelling section. Thankyou to Josh for the UI and I will be using this in my final showcase.

Modelling

This is the mouksx Toy Story 2 modding decompiled there are a few issues with this decompiled version such as not cot and bed pillars are invisible as they use planes and decals to display. This is not acceptable as it is not see able from all angles which could make the game feel odd. This mod also came with LOD which I removed this is because they was causing more issues then good when trying to work around it however, LOD are good for a industry standard game. To fix some of the left over issues I will be remodelling what I will be using but in a rushed fashion as this will take a lot of time. Another thing behind the scenes was that there was a lot of duplicated textures and materials which I should also short out but due to scale I did not have this time.

The textures would not work and therefore, I had to manually apply them using blender and image textures as unreal engine was reading this as a singular mesh so only one material could be applied at a time. There is one little issue and that is that the eyes did not transfer over despite materials being the exact same.

These are what I modelled just using some cubes and modifiers to get the job done I tried to make them all within the same style as the free assets I got from blenderkit which combined looks alright you can definitely tell I have a way to go within my modelling.

These are not made by me but instead from blenderkit which is a free to use asset browser but sometimes requires paid membership to access certain models. However, these assets was mostly the ones which I could do but due to the slim time scale I had to use some free.

Animations

I rigged this using mixamo and this is the skeleton that we was left with. It is a very basic skeleton however, we could reuse the Unreal engine default animations which can be helpful.

In unreal engine my first main goal was to retarget animations this is because the original jump animation is hard to replace using Maximo and therefore, I decided to use the unreal engine default one instead. However, I did ned to redo the blend space for idle to walk and as I didn’t see a need for it I just deleted it and plugged in my walk animation. This made it look more stubby this will give it more of a toy feeling. The animations are still not great this is because of the weight that follows in the spine. However, for a test demo this I can live without doing as I am tight on time.

Progress

Having them all in separate files did help originally however, it also has a very bad lack of organisation if done poorly which I did. However, I still managed to get Buzz and the blueprints all inserted into one project.

I tried to add textures to the new meshes but sadly I could only get solid colours to work only. This was not a design choice but instead a way in order to get the game to actually have assets which can function and act the way I want them to. If I explored materials at a earlier date I would have been most likely be able to of it.

Some collisions had to be redone and at this point I did not understand what I had to do but I found setting it to max would normally give me the results I was after.

Final

Reflection

What worked well?

The escape room successfully meets the brief requirements featuring a timer and 3 puzzle designs. It also met my goal of environment engulfing the player as it cause the player to explore the level. It also works well together and shows the story in a show don’t tell way. This meets my design goal because of it meeting the requirements for this project.

The layout is recognisable to the modding kit using my own assets which was one area which got too little attention for the visuals. From a fan view this definitely looks like a pre-alpha but has protentional to go on.

The puzzles felt unique and felt like you was the Buzz lightyear in Andy’s bedroom. With the player being forced to explore Andy’s bedroom for the mechanics to be done in order causing a sense of order but at the same time exploration. RC added a sense of uniqueness this is because it was a puzzle designed around the game not a generic one that you’d find in any game. This met my idea of including a never seen before mechanic and something new to bring to the table.

A good thing about this project is that there was a lot of independent code allowing me to gain a greater experience and understand what I was doing. It helped with the fact that I had a little bit before the project started. I enjoyed doing it independent and only used a YouTube video when it was necessary and built up confidence using the software. This can reflect how my skills have grown and where I can improve for next time. This made the development process easier to an extent but due to throwing myself in the deep end with no clear plan on how I want the system to work it made me fall behind on my time.

This was a great learning experience for me because I found out a lot of areas where I struggled and where I need to improve on. I also got better with Unreal Engine compeered to last year. I would change the visual style in the future trying to make it look like the toy story from the movies rather than a “Roblox game” this was a major floor in my selling point of the game.

What didn’t work well?

I ran into a lot of issues when making this project for example I had many unreal engine projects this was because of issues like not importing the code from one that I made to another or the textures would just not load. There was so many mysteries within this project on way something wasn’t working but instead of tackling them I made a new project each time. In the industry game files are often spreaded out into little projects to lower the risks of leaks and paludism this is a huge part of their pipeline. For example 3D modellers won’t have access to the full game files as that has a high risk and therefore, they have to submit it separably for a few highly trusted people to put into one big project same can be said for coding sometimes teams are accepted if things relied on other things but mostly it is kept apart. But for a solo developer this problem occurred because it was scattered everywhere with poor organisation and it affected the workflow and time management.

In time management skills I think it was done poorly this is because we was set this unit at the beginning of the year. In doing so we have had to balance 5 other units and work experience therefore, this project kept getting delayed and delayed as first come first serve in doing this I poorly managed my time on this unit. With mistakes happening such as not importing things I wanted imported in other files this lead me to try and complete the game within a week as it was on the backlog for sometime. In the industry time is important and has to be well managed this gave me more experience in that part of the industry and that it is a area which I have to significantly improve on as a large majority of the project was done very late as I didn’t manage this unit time well.

I spent so long planning and coming up with idea. I completely forgot about the game and should have focused on that and meeting the requirements first. By the time this realisation it was already too late and I had to speed run making the entire gameplay system. I should have stuck to the modding kit and worked on fixing collisions and stuff as they are better looking. The reason why the planning took so long to settle on a idea was because of other units and coming with a idea that I would be proud off. This caused me to make the game on the fly so I worked every single day for almost three weeks straight trying to fix this mistake.

Overall

The player feel that the game is complete however, from the first instance of pressing play they could tell that it was a pre-alpha as there is a lot of refinement that needs doing they even compeered it to a ROBLOX game that you’d find. However, the player enjoyed exploring the enviourment and solving the puzzles. But the player confirmed that exploration and puzzle met the goal of the assignment.

Overall the project is fully functional and playable and can be shown as a Pre-Alpha due to not all mechanics are fully flushed out but enough to get a general idea. The final product felt playable establishing a complete pre-alpha. The game is suppose to create an experience that is both familiar and distinctive to Toy Story fans. The research helped significantly understanding what is a escape room, how they are made, their mechanics. Due to how I had to change a lot of the mechanics which I feel like effected the player experience for example adding VFX and shooting to Buzz to stronger enforce the feel of playing as Buzz. On the escape room a lot of mistakes were made due to over estimation others were bad decisions and some parts got way too much attention than the other causing a unfairness on the gamee.

What could I do differently next time?

I would start by trying to get the core idea planned weather I was happy with it or not before trying to make it look good and better. I would also not develop on the fly and dive head in first as that caused me to get overwhelmed then build upon the idea.

References

store.steampowered.com. (n.d.). Inside the Backrooms on Steam. [online] Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1987080/Inside_the_Backrooms/.

store.steampowered.com. (n.d.). Granny on Steam. [online] Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/962400/Granny/.

Sketchfab (2023). Sketchfab. [online] Sketchfab. Available at: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/buzz-lightyear-e914bf92026b4fd096fc34dc2760fecc [Accessed 16 Feb. 2026].

‌mouksx (2025). Toy-Story-2-Modding/Decompiled/Models/LVL_1.ANDYSHOUSE at master · mouksx/Toy-Story-2-Modding. [online] GitHub. Available at: https://github.com/mouksx/Toy-Story-2-Modding/tree/master/Decompiled/Models/LVL_1.ANDYSHOUSE

Adobe (2019). Mixamo. [online] Mixamo.com. Available at: https://www.mixamo.com/.

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