I’m excited to share about an idea that was inspired by the youth group at my church. The students love games and especially competitive games. We have been having a lot of fights lately so I thought it would be a good idea to try a game where we all worked together as a team. So, I started looking up escape rooms and then thought that it would be a cool project for me to tackle as well.

Overview

Imagine being able to design and run your own escape rooms right from your browser. A really simple application that allowed you to set a time limit, add challenges (both physcial and mental), and then share it with your friends. You could even have a leaderboard to see who can escape the fastest.

The idea is that I would have an app that I could log in and quickly create custom challenges like trivia and word scrambles that could be compiled into an escape room experience. I could then run the escape room right from my phone and even use screen mirroring to display the challenges on a TV.

Current Status

I created a proof of concept here: GHWC Escape Room

This proof of concept was just a single escape room that has hardcoded challenges in it. I am currently thinking through and planning how to modularize the challenges so that I can easily add new ones and create a way to save entire escape rooms. I am also thinking through how to make the challenges more interactive and fun.

The big work that I am focusing on with the project is thinking it through and writing out the plan for how I want to improve it and actually build out a full scale application. I may not feel like it is something I want to take on right now :) but I am excited to think through the possibilities.

Possibilities

I think there is a lot of possibility to include generative AI in the concept. Especially in the trivia and word challenges. You could easily prompt a language model to generate a trivia question or a word scramble based on a user topic. There are tons of potential as well for AI to be like the narrator of the escape room and to give hints and clues to the players.

Tech Stack

Right now I’m utilziing a serverless structure, hosting the main page in S3 on AWS iwth Cloudfront, Lambda for the backend, and DynamoDB for the database. I’m also using a lot of Javascript and HTML/CSS for the front end. I’m also using a lot of AWS services like API Gateway, CloudFormation, and CodePipeline to automate the deployment process.

I’ll be sharing updates as I progress, and I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions. Stay tuned for more on this creative journey!