Raccoon Serious Games develops and hosts educational activities such as escape room events and serious games. They create both physically- and digitally-based escape rooms across many different scales. These events consist of a variety of puzzles and tasks the player(s) have to solve in order to finish or `escape' the event. For their digitally hosted events, the Massive Online Reactive Serious Escape 2.0 (MORSE) system is used for creation and configuration of the needed underlying rules of the event. The system uses the `If This Then That' (IFTTT) principle for creating rules, where a trigger activated by the player/game can initiate a check about the state of the game which then results in an action by the game. In MORSE the user (usually the game host) can choose from the multiple types of triggers, conditions, and actions to create logical statements in the IFTTT format. These statements together form the rules of the game. This system, although a good improvement over the previously hard-coded procedure, has proven unintuitive to program for most of the employees at Raccoon Serious Games. The IFTTT format used is unwieldy to work with for the designers, who have little to no programming background. Furthermore this existing system provides no overview of the rules system making it challenging to visualise the whole game and its dynamics. To solve the unintuitive nature of MORSE, our team designed and developed Feather: A graph-based visual editing tool that is integrated into MORSE. It can generate rule and ruleset logic needed for the client's escape events. It uses visual components and presents the user with a graph of the whole game during the design process. The editor can be used together with all other, earlier existing, features for creating rulesets of the MORSE system. This tool has most of the functionality the current system has, with the possibility of easily extending it with new components. The product was built as an addition to MORSE over the course of 10 weeks. In the initial part of the project a thorough research was performed on the needs of the client as well as useful resources or libraries and design practices for domain specific visual languages. The second part of the project was devoted to the design and implementation of the tool. Throughout the duration of the project a number of user tests were conducted with the employees at Raccoon Serious Games to assess the understanding and usability of the product. ... Read more

The M.O.R.S.E. system is a tool for creating and managing large escape events, mainly used for local escape events. The tool is designed for only a limited range of puzzle types and styling options because most of the puzzles require physical items in order to solve a puzzle and only the answers have to be entered in M.O.R.S.E. Because of this design, it is really difficult to create online escape experiences, especially rich and immersive ones. It also requires a lot of programming outside of the M.O.R.S.E. system to do so. Raccoon Serious Games , the client, does not have many employees with programming experience and, therefore, it is not feasible for them to create the rich and immersive online escape experiences they want. To be able to create such immersive experiences, we are extending M.O.R.S.E. with editable domains and web pages. Game designers can add domains and web pages to the existing event schedule and then puzzles can be created for web pages. Players can view one or multiple of these domains and for each domain, the active web page will be served. Web pages can be created and stored in the domains, but the actual contents of the web pages still have to be made. Because making web pages is often a programming intensive task, a page builder has been created in M.O.R.S.E. This page builder allows the user to load and save web pages created in the M.O.R.S.E.
system. It uses a drag-and-drop system to place building-block elements inside the web pages and allows for directly visible styling of those elements. Because of this, the user does not need programming knowledge of the underlying implementation of the web pages. It also facilitates the linking between M.O.R.S.E. features and the domains such as puzzles and triggers for buttons. Using the import and export functionality, users can easily copy previous web pages created with the page builder. This is not only limited to internal web pages but can also be used to import external code from outside the page builder. With user-friendly features such as the ability to undo and redo changes, the page builder tries to make creating web pages as easy as possible. An important aspect of the escape games hosted by Raccoon Serious Games is team building. We extend upon this notion by adding roles and a leaderboard screen to M.O.R.S.E., both of which increase the need and opportunity for interaction between players. The addition of roles allows game designers to enforce cooperation in their escape events, by restricting the access to resources required for solving a puzzle to only a subset of the players in a team. This way they have to cooperate and combine their information and resources to solve all puzzles. The addition of leaderboards is also an extra incentive for a player in a team to work together efficiently because this will positively impact their score and, therefore, ranking on the leaderboard. ... Read more

Raccoon Serious Games develops different kinds of gaming experiences, including escape rooms. In an escape room, a group of players, usually between 2 and 20 people, are locked in a room, where they have to find clues and solve puzzles to escape. When such a room is played, there is always an operator, monitoring the progress of the players and keeping an eye on their safety. Modern escape rooms are quite technologically advanced, where all components of the room interact with each other. To run these games, Raccoon Serious Games needs a system which should manage all technical aspects within the room and provide a way for the operator to keep track of the players. Furthermore, the system must be flexible enough to handle many different escape rooms, which are hardcoded in configuration files. To meet these needs of Raccoon Serious Games, a team of three developers has developed a new system, called S.C.I.L.E.R.. In ten weeks, they have created a system from scratch. First, they researched technologies and requirements that would be necessary for the system and afterwards implemented the system based on their findings. S.C.I.L.E.R. allows an operator to monitor a complete escape room. The system connects a user interface to all the devices in the room, which are controlled by the user as well as the configuration of the escape room. This configuration is generated from a JSON configuration file, containing all information for the escape room. The system allows the operator to send hints to the players, control the time and manage their progress through the status of devices in the room and the puzzles they have to solve. It also contains the feeds of cameras in the room to actually see the players. Furthermore, it provides the user with a way to check a configuration file and put it to use. The system will be used by Raccoon Serious Games in the near future for the escape rooms that they will be hosting. ... Read more

Raccoon Serious Games hosts so called escape events. These events are similar to an escape room in which teams work together to solve puzzles, only on larger scale. Different kinds of challenges, arise when hosting these events, such as monitoring the progress of the teams and managing collection of physical puzzles. For an escape event, different kinds of staff help the teams to have the best experience possible. The teams need to be able to submit their answers to puzzles, while the staff should provide them with the right materials and monitor their progress. To facilitate these needs, Raccoon Serious Games created the Massive Online Reactive Serious Escape (M.O.R.S.E) system. However, the old system lacked in the parts of modularity and flexibility, while having the event hardcoded. To solve this problem, we created a new system to improve the lesser points of the old system while also improving the usability and maintainability. Over the course of ten weeks, we researched and created the Massive Online Reactive Serious Escape 2.0 (M.O.R.S.E 2.0) system. The first part of the project consisted of researching the previous system to find the requirements for a new system. After that, a new system was designed and implemented from the ground up. M.O.R.S.E 2.0 contains all the functionality of the old system, while also improving the structure of the administrator panel. Furthermore, the final product comes with several editors, allowing for designing the puzzles, schedule and logic in the form of rulesets for an escape event and allowing multiple events to be created managed. Furthermore the configuration editor allows the employees of Raccoon Serious Games to adjust different types of settings and cosmetics. The product was successfully tested during an escape event and will be used by Raccoon Serious Games for future events. ... Read more