Picking an Engine

When I first got the idea for this game (at the amazing Escape Rooms in Education Showcase where I gave a talk this year), I knew that the engine I wanted to use for this game was Tyranobuilder.  I had some familiarity with the engine from building a visual novel several years back and so I knew that the affordances of the platform (create scenes with clickable areas and buttons, build branching paths, track variables) would be perfect for what I was imagining.  If each scene was a window on the computer that the player was hacking then the desktop could feature several buttons masquerading as icons which, when clicked, would open a folder or a website that the player could scour for information.

However, I wasn't sure how I would manage the input of passwords within the engine.  Could Tyranobuilder accept and store strings of text and judge to see whether they matched an existing correct answer? Could it divert the player to different places within the story's script depending on if they got a password right or wrong?  That I had not tried before.

Luckily, I found this tutorial on the Tyranobuilder home page describing how to ask the player to input the name that they wanted to be called.  I learned that the input box could turn the string of text the player entered into the value for a pre-set variable.  Then, I could set up a check to see if the string matched the answer I intended for the puzzle. If it was right, the player could be rewarded with entry into a new area of the computer. If it was wrong, they could be given an error message and asked to try again.

I decided also that, rather than using a timer to decide how long the player had to finish the puzzle as with traditional escape rooms, I would instead calculate a variable behind the scenes that I would call "sneaky."  Every time the player entered a wrong password that variable would increase, triggering a game over if it reached a certain threshold (the logic being that every wrong entry would send a notification text to the teacher's phone and enough texts would cause him to head back to his classroom to see what was going on).

So I had my basic idea in place and my engine selected!  Next up would be to build the first puzzle: logging into the teacher's computer so you can access the desktop!

We will talk about that puzzle in the next devlog!