The Philosopher's Stone
An immersive escape room game that users can carry out at home, either as a stand-alone experience or as preparation for the physical escape room. From this project, I learned the importance of user testing early in the design process. For the success of this game, it was very important that all kinds of participants were able to solve the puzzles, regardless of escape room experience. Apart from this, a lot had to be tested to ensure all details were thought off. For example, whether the box would fit through every mailbox and if the bottles would not break during postage.
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The box contained several parts of a bigger puzzle, such as a decipher wheel, a secret compartment, and several bottles of salt. With the decipher wheel users could find the recipe that would tell them how to transform their salt into the philosopher's stone.
Creating the stone
This process of transforming salt into crystals is based on an activity I did a lot as a child and is actually really easy. If you boil a special kind of salt together with distilled water, and pour it into a cup containing something small like a piece of rope, the salt will crystallize and attach itself to your object, creating a ‘gemstone’.
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