In our previous conversations we had a fun chat with Zesty and Cico, and now it's time for (drumroll.....) - Duc! Duc stands out as one of the crème de la crème in the realm of room building for Escape Simulator. His creations, such as The Projectionist, Under the Sea, The Clockwork Games (and more), rank among the finest available on the Steam Workshop.
Under the Sea
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into playing Escape Simulator?
My alias is Duc, I’m 28 from the UK. During working hours, I’m an air traffic controller that dabbles in IT. Other interests include motorsport, photography, and laying down.
The date is 16 Dec 2021 - Some friends and I had just finished Overcooked 2 and were looking for more co-op fun. We had completed some escape rooms in real life so Escape Simulator seemed like an ideal purchase. We binged through the developer's rooms in short order and dove into the community rooms.
The unhealthy obsession continues to this day! I used to play a serious amount of Rocket League in my spare time. As of the time of writing, I’ve played 2467 hours of it. Steam tells me I haven’t played the game since Feb 2022 so escape sim has done pretty well to displace rocket league from my life.
What inspired you to start designing rooms in the game?
Riddles, Books and a Lab
A friend of mine, ‘TheChubbyWalrus’ created a room for our group of 4 to have a go at. As soon as we finished it, I knew I had to return the favour. That room became ‘Riddles, Books and a Lab’. I published it as public, but it never occurred to me that anyone else would play it. The next day it had 20 likes, a couple of weeks later it had 1000. And from that moment on it just got out of hand.
Can you walk us through your process of creating a room? (you sketch on paper, what tools, how you start)
Whatever you think my creative process is, it is far less sophisticated than that!
Rooms 3-8 were created around the same question. What interesting real-world environments can be feasibly created within the escape sim editor? I’ll crack open OneNote and brainstorm ideas with my partner. Before the model importer, skyboxes, and advanced lighting were added to the editor, outdoor environments were extremely challenging.
I have an old experimental room where I probably spent 30 hours playing around with various props in the editor trying to get it to work. But it never saw the light of day due to the editors’ limitations. And these 30 hours aren’t me trying to develop puzzles or playing with logic.
This is 30 hours of retexturing random props and rescaling them so that I can create whatever monstrosity it is I need for the environment to work. If there is a world record for the longest time spent rescaling a folded stack of clothes to turn it into a distant set of green hills, I am the record holder.
Once I’ve got an environment with a nice-looking floor and established a new horizon, then I’ll start planning out the total playable area in the editor. I’ll grab the nearest envelope and a biro and sketch a very simple plan. That envelope will then sit on my desk for the next for weeks/months whilst I clumsily place props in the editor.
Once the room is 60-70% physically assembled, then I will start thinking about adding puzzles. Generally speaking, the environment inspires the puzzles rather than the other way around.
Now the editor has more tools, there are fewer limitations. The model importer being the big one.
Fortunately, the days of using random props to create things are over! Most of my time is spent in Blender having a crack at modeling things. Imported models are the best way of getting the most performance out of a room, so long as the number of vertices and the texture sizes aren’t ridiculous.
You were one of the winners during last year’s Build-A-Thon, for which you made a tiny room within only 48 hours. How was it to work under such pressure?
The Projectionist
Shockingly, the 48 hours was far less stressful than Build-a-room #2 & #3’s 2 weeks. And I would put this down to the scope of the room (The Projectionist) being relatively simple from the start.
I knew that if I made the room too complex then any minor setbacks during creation would cause the room development to fall behind and eventually feel incomplete once the timer runs out. I made this mistake in Build-a-room #2 with The Virtual Prison. Learned from the mistake with The Projectionist. Then forgot the lesson again in Build-a-thon #3 with ‘Relativity’...
The 48 hours even included a picturesque walk in the lovely British countryside to record the footage for the movie clips in the room. That being said, I must have gotten 6 hours sleep within that 48-hour period.
What are some of your favorite rooms you've created so far, and what makes them unique?
Let me out
Creating a room is a labour of love. It consumes a considerable proportion of your life. In a way, they are all my favourite for their own reasons. Let Me Out is probably my current favourite as I’m a fan of horror rooms.
It was the first room (to my knowledge) to use a professional voice actor. Looking back it’s not the greatest and it doesn’t even have many puzzles in it despite being in a game about puzzles! Nevertheless, I have a soft spot for it.
Aside from winning the Build-A-Thon, you also entered several other room-building contests. How does your room-building process differ when you’re creating for a contest as opposed to rooms that you are building in your ‘free time’?
Pure chaos. I’ve entered 3 contests and the 2 build-a-rooms were just madness. Creative direction is constantly changing. Entire ideas evaporating or appearing out of thin air due to necessity. I’d put this down to myself always wanting the scope of the rooms to be as large and impressive as possible.
At first, 2 weeks feels like an eternity. “Oh yeah, I can get that done in a day. Oh that puzzle will be easy to sort the logic for.” Then you realise you’ve got 2 days left, nothing is ready, and the original concept is a husk of it’s former self. Great puzzle ideas get ditched because the time to properly execute them no longer exists.
So yes. Chaos… But you better believe I’ll be doing the exact same thing in the next competition!
In my free time, ideas can come and go naturally. Assets can be created slow-time and if something is a creative dead end, it doesn’t matter. What’s the rush? Ideas that turn out to not be fun or don’t make sense can be deleted and better ideas have the time to be developed and sculpted.
Most of your rooms contain a lot of animations, visuals, and environments that exist outside of the puzzle room itself. How do you go about making these environments feel ‘alive’?
Relativity
All I try to accomplish is the same feat that all other games employ. If there’s a window, you should be able to see something nice out of it. If you pour a bucket of water, the bucket should be animated nicely, make a water pouring sound, and have water coming out of it. It’s fair to say I spend 80% of the room creation time on these finer details.
They often add nothing to the puzzles. But it’s these details that make a room more memorable and enchanting to me.
How do you come up with the themes and puzzles for your rooms?
Virtual Prison
The usual scenario is to pick a theme that hasn’t been done before. A theme that is possible within the confines of the editor. A theme that has the potential to look pretty or striking or both.
As mentioned previously, the puzzles are centered around the environment. For example, in ‘Under the Sea’ I was making a colourful animated fish as a background prop and thought “ahhhh, I can use that!”
What do you think are the key elements to creating a challenging yet enjoyable escape room?
In my crazy dreamworld, I like to believe that it’s possible to create a room that everyone plays and has a fun time with. This is not what happens. Everyone has different tastes. And that’s okay. The next best thing is to make a room that most players will enjoy.
That room has a difficulty that is easy/moderate. It might be challenging, but it most certainly will not be hard. A good room should not require the player to be very smart. But a good room should leave the player feeling smart.
What are some tips and tricks you can share with players who want to try their hand at designing rooms in Escape Simulator?
Virtual Prison
Do you have a best friend? Forget them. Your new best friend is the ‘empty’. It is nothing, yet it can do everything. It might not be today, tomorrow, or even next week. But one day you will realise that the empty is the most important thing in your creative life.
Most effects can be retextured for some pretty impressive and often chaotic results. Play around with the effects and let your imagination run wild. I was able to create a ‘bubbles’ effect by taking the ‘snow’ effect, flipping it upside down and retexturing the snow particles with a simple bubble png.
What are some lessons you’ve learned the hard way as a creator for Escape Simulator?
What I like isn’t always what the rest of the world likes. And that’s okay.
A great example is found within my Build-a-room #2 submission, ‘The Virtual Prison’. In that room, there is a mini game which is essentially just basketball. There’s a little scoreboard and an announcer. I loved it.
But this is Escape Simulator, not NBA 2k23. People hopped into that room and got frustrated that they were having to throw basketballs into a moving hoop. And I completely understand. This is a puzzle game after all, and I handed the player something that isn’t a puzzle. That room also contained a frogger rip-off. I’m now asking the player to do some ‘action/platforming’ in a puzzle game.
I was hard on myself for months after this room was released due it’s less than favourable reception. It wasn’t until Dr_Poly played through the room on a stream that I decided to play it again myself… And I loved it!
It sounds horribly narcissistic, but I had a great time throwing balls with an over exuberant announcer and dodging cars like an 80’s frog.
It’s important for creators to understand that you should create what makes you happy. If you have fun playing it, there’s a good chance that most others are going to enjoy it too!
Can you share any memorable experiences or funny stories that have happened while you were designing or playing your escape rooms?
Under the Sea
I was putting together the layout of ‘Under the Sea’ in the editor and realised I had backed myself into a corner. I had accidentally placed all the assets in such a way that it wouldn’t be possible/make sense for the underwater facility to route where it needed to. I certainly didn’t want to undo hours of work.
Then my partner said to me, “why don’t you just go underground?” And I thought, “Nah that’s mad. I’d have to cut out a hole in the mesh of the sea floor and build an entirely new section off to the side to create an indoor space. Crazy. Too much work…”
Hours go by and I thought, well actually she is right. Going underground whilst underwater sounds quite fun and unexpected. You’re at the bottom of the ocean and you end up going even lower! It started as a simple ladder down into a basement.
Somehow that morphed into creating some sort of London Underground ripoff with a moving train section. I wouldn’t have even attempted a moving train section because I wouldn’t have considered it possible. Then I remembered towards the end of Zesty’s Ominous Obelisk; he had a moment where all the players move vertically in an elevator in a very convincing fashion.
So why wouldn’t it work horizontally?
In summary, Under the Sea’s most memorable section only exists due to my poor planning and a bit of lateral thinking from my partner.
What are some of the nicest reactions or interactions you’ve had with people who played one of your rooms?
Clockwork Games
It’s difficult to narrow it down. I’m grateful to have received a lot of positive support over the past 20 months (at time of writing) of this escape sim journey I find myself on. The comment section for Under The Sea is a great place to start.
Actually, scratch that. I know what it is. After the Build-a-room #3. Mumbo said this to me on the Pine Studio Discord regarding Relativity.
"Duc I think you are the number 1 greatest 3d environment artist escape simulator has to offer and this is the number 1 most beautiful room in ES."
There was plenty of helpful constructive criticism in there as well but the above comment has always stuck with me.
What do you feel has been your greatest ‘Escape Simulator accomplishment’ so far?
Pine choosing me for this!
Are there any features you would like to see added to the room editor in future updates?
True 2D sprites. We have transparents which is incredible. (RIP Space sticker.) But a transparent that rotates itself to always face the player would be neat.
Having more animation keyframes. The current workaround for fancy animations is to stack parented empties or whip out LUA. But it’s a bit cumbersome and certainly a roadblock for newer creators.
More animation curves. Linear and smooth are good, but it is not enough for all purposes. For example: an object falling off a shelf and hitting the floor. I challenge someone to animate that in ES and make it look realistic. I know how I would do it and it would be such a pain to put together.
Blender allows you to hold shift while interacting with an object to adjust it in finer increments. Having that in escape sim would change my life. And would save me needing to change the numeric values each time I want something lined up with something else. Having granular control over minute distances would be excellent.
Stairs. Stairs. Please.
Are there any other room designers in the game whose work you admire or draw inspiration from?
The creators that stand out are the ones that are doing things that nobody had done before them. Pioneers. Visionaries. The list is colossal. I believe there are least 20 creators whose rooms I’ve played and gone “Wow, what a fantastic idea!” Sadly, I didn’t write down every time that happened so apologies to those not listed.
Cico: The OG pioneer. Those who have been playing workshop rooms from the very beginning will remember ‘A Pirates Legend.’ A Cico room which is no longer available today. However, it was the first true example of a very well executed outdoor environment. Before this, I had no idea the editor had the capability! If Cico hadn’t made that room, it’s a fair shout to say I probably wouldn’t have created 8 rooms by now. But this is surprising to no one. I’m certain every creator looks up to Cico in the same way as I do.
Zesty: He showed the community that escape sim can be far more than just a series of connected rooms. Devilish Diorama was a fantastic idea fantastically executed. A feat unmatched until he brought out a sequel. The game design in these rooms is so intelligent and intuitive. The player is transported into the mesmerising world that Zesty has created. I’ve spent the past few months continuously pressing refresh on Zesty’s workshop page hoping for a 3rd installment. Any. Day. Now.
Robin: In every Build-a-room competition I’ve entered, Robin has finished 1 place ahead of me. This is no accident. I remember playing those rooms and being overwhelmed with amazement. Immortal Canvas stands alongside the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and Machu Pichu. Absolute perfection in every regard and I have no idea how it was made. No doubt during my next room, I’ll be looking at Immortal Canvas and trying to capture a glimpse of its excellence. Shout-out to Spellbound.
Franch: Because audio is vital to creating a complete game experience. INSIDE, The Bastet Cat, and This Way Up are all auditory treats! No creator has put as much dedication into sound as Franch.
I’m hardly scratching the surface here. The community is rich with talent, and I would need a few thousand more words to give the credit where it is due.
What are your future plans for designing rooms in Escape Simulator? Do you have any big projects in the works? ;)
I like to think that Under The Sea was a spiritual successor to Clockwork Inc. This next one is a spiritual successor to Under The Sea. It’s still early in development but the scope is very large. Far larger than Under The Sea.
Do you often collaborate with other creators?
The Collab: Museum
Beyond contributing towards the incredible Collab 2 Museum project. My main collaborator is my partner, Haze. Every room I’ve created has contained ideas, puzzles, concepts from Haze.
Even voice acting on occasion! Many of the rooms would have been completely different if it wasn’t for Haze’s influence. TheChubbyWalrus and AngryLasagne joined the team during The Virtual Prison for Build-a-room #2. Without their combined efforts, that room would have been an absolute shambles!
Thank you, Duc!
Thank you, Duc for taking the time to respond to our questions!
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