How To Design Your Own Virtual Escape Room Game At Home

If you're looking for a fantastic game for your kids, look no further. We'll teach you how to make your own escape room! No, you won't need any carpentry skills or high-tech locks. This escape room is virtual. The kids will be able to play on a computer or tablet, so your house gets to stay mess-free.

Virtual escape rooms can be played anywhere. Taking a trip with the kids? Bring the escape room on the plane. Spending the night in a hotel? Set them up on wifi and let them go. 

Digital escape rooms also work wonders in classrooms. They test kids' knowledge in an immersive manner, allowing them to display mastery of the material while having fun. They can also serve as homework assignments. No more worksheets! (hurray!).

If you'd like to bring your escape room into the 'real world', then this guide will walk you through it. But otherwise, let's jump in!

Google Forms is where online escape rooms started — and for a good reason. Making a tremendous online escape room is a snap with Google Forms. It's got all the easy-to-use tools you need, right in your browser.

But I'll tell you a sneaky secret... Google Forms is really an online worksheet! Of course, you can add elements that make it better than a plain old worksheet (there's no mimeographed ink bleeding onto your hands, for a start), but it's a far cry from the interactive escape room games that kids will be familiar with. That said, it's the perfect starting point, so here's how it works:

Players begin with a puzzle. Google forms will only allow you to use a single, non-interactive image and some descriptive text to construct your puzzle. Players must solve the puzzle and enter their answer in the space below the puzzle. If they solve the puzzle correctly, they move on to the next one. If their answer is incorrect, they must start over. If you've designed the game correctly, they should also hear an annoying sound announcing their failure!

Google Forms works because it's so simple. You don't need any specialized knowledge to get started, you can just jump in and start designing! It's also simple for players. Players need almost no instruction to play the escape room. However, after several questions, it feels like a mimeographed worksheet. So keep it short to keep the kids engaged right to the end of the game.

NOTE: The Google Forms structure wonderfully lends itself to tests and homework assignments. You can determine how well your students learned the material. They display their talents while having a blast solving fun puzzles!

Google Slides allows you to design a more immersive escape room. You can use Powerpoint or similar programs. However, Google Slides allows you to keep your escape room online, so players can access it whenever they like.

Google Slides converts the worksheet-like Google Forms into a point-and-click adventure. Players click on objects to find clues to help them solve puzzles. It plays like a commercial escape room, where players search the room for clues before solving the room's puzzles, except that no one stubs their toe on the vampire's casket.

With Google Slides, you can create scenes using background photos and other visual art. You can make your own escape room with images from the internet that fit your theme and puzzles. Once you design the scene, place interactable objects into it to allow the players to search for clues.

Google Slides integrates well with Google Forms. Just design certain objects to link to Google Forms puzzles. Players have to use information obtained in the Google Slides scenes to solve the Google Forms puzzle. Correctly entering the solution allows the players to obtain other clues, move to the next puzzle, or win the game.

A collection of questions is just a worksheet. For the players to immerse themselves in the game, there has to be a theme. For an Ancient Egypt class, the theme could be Tut's Tomb. You could build the theme for an English class around a recently read novel. Imagine making an escape room out of Huck Finn or The Lord of The Flies. Kids would love it!

Your theme must relate to the escape room's goal. The answer to the following questions will assist with your theme.

What are the players trying to achieve? You have to start with the end in mind. It's ok, English teachers! You're writing the ending first, not reading the ending first! Knowing what the players need to do to escape lets you design appropriate puzzles.

What stands in their way? Knowing what obstacles the players face allows you to design puzzles related to these difficulties. Remember, the obstacles have to be word problems. While computers have come a long way over the years, we're still not at the Weird Science level. The players will have to solve word problems to win the game.

What are the consequences of not achieving their goal? All great escape rooms have a penalty for not escaping in time. You become the zombie's victim, the mummy's food, or have to listen to your parent's "music" for several hours.

Players know that they need to escape, but they also need to know what to escape from. You tend to run much faster when being chased. This element increases the tension and creates more opportunities for players to immerse themselves in the game.

With these elements in mind, it is easier to design a killer theme! Have a blast and develop an excellent theme for your escape room... or, you know... just steal one of these.

Virtual escape rooms typically have 3-5 challenges. You pick the number of challenges based on their difficulty and the anticipated length of the game. Remember, challenges that are too difficult or too easy rob the players of a good time (check out this guide for examples).

The challenges are specific tasks that must be completed to win the game. This could be swinging across the river, opening a safe, or removing the stolen loot Money Heist style.

When making your own escape room, you can lay out the challenges in two ways: you can design a linear game or a non-linear game.

A linear game requires the players to solve puzzles in a strict linear order. Think of it as a Frogger escape room. Once you make it safely out of one lane, you have to find a way to make it safely to the next one. 

If time is a concern, you can present the players with the following puzzle as soon as they finish the previous one. Then they can look for the clues they need to correctly solve the puzzle.

A non-linear game allows the players to solve the puzzles in any order. You can either design the puzzles to work independently or have some puzzle solutions provide clues needed to keep moving forward. If you decide to hide clues to some puzzles in the answers to other puzzles, let the players know this in advance. This may keep them from wasting too much time on a puzzle they lack the information to solve.

A non-linear game will always have one final puzzle that must be solved after the players finish the previous puzzles. Correctly answering "opens the door" and allows them to escape. You can label this one the "final puzzle" or keep it from popping up until the players defeat the initial puzzles. Let them know they are minutes away from escaping, and you'll see them dive in like they just discovered Spanish gold at the bottom of the ocean.

As we discussed earlier, virtual escape rooms lack physical challenges. Players won't be crossing the Amazon River on a rickety bridge or climbing the outside of the Empire State Building to find and defuse the bomb. So you'll need to take these challenges, and transform them into some form of word/number puzzle.

The answers must take the form of a word or number. The puzzles should have some relation to the challenges. For example, you can ask the players to determine how much paint Huck needs to whitewash the fence or how many senators participated in the assassination of Julius Caesar. Your puzzle question can make clear that the players defeat the challenge by solving it, just in case one of them starts looking for a climbing harness and a grappling hook.

You can hide the clues behind objects or in the background images using Google Slides. This gives the players an extra element to consider and should enhance their enjoyment of the game.

We're not going to abandon you to your whims (yet). Check out our list of puzzle ideas, and see which ones most closely fit the challenges you've designed.

NASA didn't send a man to the moon without testing and retesting the rockets. Edison didn't proclaim the light bulb invented without testing it. You need to test your escape room in case the puzzles don't work correctly. Did you realize that you typed 43 as the answer? Everyone knows it's 42! Now, if you only remembered the question…

The best way to test the game is by having someone else do it. By now, you've spent a ton of time with the game. It's your baby. It's perfect the way it is. Someone else may look at your puzzles and find that they don't make sense. Listen to them, reconsider your puzzles (these top tips might help), and create a game everyone can love. Well, almost everyone!

Congrats, you made your own escape room! 

Let the players roam free in your fantasy world. Then, listen to their feedback. You'll need it to design your next escape room. And there will be a next escape room!

And hey, why not share it with us escape wizards? Shoot us a message and we'll check out your game. If it's super fun, we'd love to put it up on our website for others to play!