Evscaperoom - a full playable multiplayer 'escape room' in Evennia with a layered story and multiple endings!

Griatch

Don't let her get all the pies!

~~https://itch.io/jam/enterthemud2/rate/422945 - please play, comment and rate~~

Update: No need for rating anymore, Evscaperoom won the game jam!.
Update2: The full Evscaperoom is now available to play from https://demo.evennia.com (or telnet to demo.evennia.com, port 4000). Just log in and enter evscaperoom from the first room to start!

You can play both in the browser as well as connect to the game with a traditional MU* client. Do check out the other entries of the Jam as well.

For once I can announce something other than engine- and server-related news! This is a full little game. Solve the escape-room either on your own or team up with your friends and collaborate. The game has quite an intricate story (maybe unexpectedly so), multiple endings and creepy monkeys! And pies. Lots of pies.

This is a game jam entry (run by the MudCoder's guild), created in less than a month. The theme for the jam was One Room. It implements a full text-based, multi-player 'escape room' in Python, with a whole custom point-and-click-but-in-text game engine I wrote on top of Evennia for it (Evennia, being a Python MU*-creation library, is perfect for this kind of thing).

The source code for the whole thing is available on github (follow the link) but I'll likely extract the engine-part and make it into an Evennia contrib in the future.

Comments and feedback is appreciated! Enjoy!
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Griatch

Edit: Some screenshots because why not:
login

help

options

fireplace

Griatch

Oh, and if you don't want to go via itch.io, you can also go directly to http://experimental.evennia.com

If you are interested in the code, it's freely available at https://github.com/Griatch/evscaperoom
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Griatch

Griatch

Interestingly, a Reddit commenter suggested that "entering a username/password was a HUGE barrier for playing the game". I don't really get why creating a throwaway name/password is such a blocker, but I turned on guest accounts now - so if that's how you roll, you can now play without needing to create neither a name nor password.

That 'HUGE barrier' comment made me think though, because it didn't really occur to me that it would be an issue. This came from a non-MU* subreddit, so supposedly from a representative of the non-MU* world.

Arkandel

@Griatch Nearly all multiplayer games, and I'm not talking about MU*, use usernames and passwords for authentication. That's a weird issue for that one person to have.

faraday

@Arkandel But random "hey have some fun" web apps and game apps don't. I think "huge barrier" is excessive for most folks, but it's added friction that I can see turning somebody off.

Arkandel

@faraday I guess the difference is based on whether you want to be persistent identities between sessions.

Does Evscaperoom need that?

Griatch

@Arkandel said in Evscaperoom - a full playable multiplayer 'escape room' in Evennia with a layered story and multiple endings!:

@faraday I guess the difference is based on whether you want to be persistent identities between sessions.

Does Evscaperoom need that?

If you are multiple people solving a room and want to log out and come back with the same user-name (or if you want to choose your username in the first place), then yes. But otherwise no, you don't really need it.

So as said, I've turned on guest accounts in Evennia now, so people can both play anonymously (as a suitably random-fantasy-named guest) or by the regular username/password login.

Griatch

Added some screenshots because there are way too few of those in the text world.

eye8urcake

Wow, @Griatch I'm really really liking this.

Great work, this is really thinking outside the box with the game engine. You totally get my vote.

Pandora

My husband and I spent so many hours in that little room omg. Such a fun idea, and so well put together! We eventually got stumped, but it was great anyway.

Griatch

@eye8urcake
Thanks! Yes, this makes for quite a different game-style thing a MU* game engine is usually used for. Glad you liked it

@Pandora
Awesome to hear! But you never need to get stumped - just eat a pie! The Jester baked for you after all!
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Griatch

eye8urcake

@Griatch You've got a great mind for puzzles. That's the longest I've been able to focus in what feels like forever and I really felt like I'd accomplished something in solving this even though I had to eat through some of the pie for it to catch up to where I was stuck.

I am just super impressed and your locked room made my night. Three whole hours of it.

THANK YOU! And goodnight!

Griatch

@eye8urcake said in Evscaperoom - a full playable multiplayer 'escape room' in Evennia with a layered story and multiple endings!:

@Griatch You've got a great mind for puzzles. That's the longest I've been able to focus in what feels like forever and I really felt like I'd accomplished something in solving this even though I had to eat through some of the pie for it to catch up to where I was stuck.

I am just super impressed and your locked room made my night. Three whole hours of it.

THANK YOU! And goodnight!

That's great to hear, glad you finished it and had a good time! It's also fun how everyone winning so far seems to be drawing different conclusions at the end ...

Griatch

If anyone here's interested, here's the first part of my Dev-blog about creating the Evscaperoom. It might be interesting as a view on the kind of thinking and planning was needed.

https://evennia.blogspot.com/2019/05/creating-evscaperoom-part-1.html

Griatch

https://evennia.blogspot.com/2019/05/creating-evscaperoom-part-2.html

This is the second part of my two-part post-mortem dev blog about making the Evscaperoom. This one focuses more on the technical aspects.

Selira

Having had someone just burst into a room a friend and I were working through and immediately eat a slice of pie, broadcasting the hint to the whole room -

Please give us an option to make private rooms that other people can't join in future things like this.

Overall, loving it, we're just going to back out and get back to where we were later.

Griatch

@Selira said in Evscaperoom - a full playable multiplayer 'escape room' in Evennia with a layered story and multiple endings!:

Having had someone just burst into a room a friend and I were working through and immediately eat a slice of pie, broadcasting the hint to the whole room -

Please give us an option to make private rooms that other people can't join in future things like this.

Heh, that must be a pretty rare thing to happen, but I understand it's frustrating if you were trying to solve it 'blind' (can't unsee the hint after all). This is a one-month game-jam project though, so won't be adding more features right now (still two days left to vote if you like it!). But thanks for the suggestion, I'll keep it in mind for the future!

Overall, loving it, we're just going to back out and get back to where we were later.

Glad you enjoy it! I've found that people have a lot of fun solving this together, having someone to bounce ideas off is just that little bit more enjoyable.
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Griatch

Griatch

Looks like Evscaperoom won the game jam! Woo!
Not a huge field of competitors, alas, but still.

Griatch

As a minor update; the Evscaperoom engine is now distributed together with Evennia as an optional contrib if you want to make your own multiplayer escape-room.

It is also playable in its full form on the Evennia demo server (which you can find from http://Evennia.com).

Griatch

Since people have asked me about it, the Evscaperoom can nowadays be played in the browser at https://demo.evennia.com or via telnet at demo.evennia.com port 4000. After you connect, just write evscaperoom in the first room to start!

Please read the help carefully, due to the restrictions of the format (read my dev blog above for more info), this does not play quite like a normal MU* does.

Plenty of people have tried (and seem to have enjoyed) this, both trying to solve the puzzles and trying to deduce what the heck is actually going on in that little village by the highway. It's really fun to see people use the multi-player aspect to join a room in pairs/groups to solve it together too!