escaperoom

Escape rooms are a game form where the objective is to complete the mission and "escape" from a locked room. A successful escape involves finding hidden clues and solving puzzles spread through out the room in a pre-determined amount of time.

Virtual escape rooms, take this experience and put it online for groups of people not geographically co-located to still enjoy it as a group. These have become popular especially now given the pandemic and stay at home orders.

This package provides a simple command to take a escape room configuration and host it as a virtual experience for you and your family/friends to enjoy.

Features

• Simple CLI interface.
• No complicated setup.
• No coding knowledge required.
• Design your own escape room experience for your friends and family to enjoy!

Demo

Using sherlockcampaign generates an EscapeRoom as shown in the demo.

Setup

Using pip

pip install escaperoom

Directly from the repository

git clone https://github.com/csurfer/escaperoom.git
python escaperoom/setup.py install

Usage

Pre-requisites:

1. Have your escaperoom configuration ready. Something along the lines of examplecampaigns.

Help text

escaperoom --help

Validation

JSON file provided is validated against the jsonschema file for type and key correctness.

escaperoom validate <path_to_json_file>

Running/Hosting the escape room

# To run with default host and port.
escaperoom run <path_to_json_file>
# To run with specific host and port.
escaperoom run <path_to_json_file> --host <customhost> --port <customport>

Configuration

This is the only detail you need to worry about. A JSON file in a specific format contains details of the escape room you want to host and this section throws light on the different components of the configuration file.

Example configuration file:

{
    "story": {
        "title": "Sample title.",
        "text": "Sample text.",
        "images": ["<story image1>", "<story image2>"]
    },
    "puzzles": [
        {
            "title": "Puzzle 1 title",
            "text": "Puzzle 1 text",
            "images": ["<puzzle1 image1>", "<puzzle1 image2>"],
            "hints": ["<puzzle1 hint1>", "<puzzle1 hint2>"],
            "answer": "<puzzle1 answer>"
        },
        {
            "title": "Puzzle 2 title",
            "text": "Puzzle 2 text",
            "images": ["<puzzle2 image1>", "<puzzle2 image2>"],
            "hints": ["<puzzle2 hint1>", "<puzzle2 hint2>"],
            "answer": "<puzzle2 answer>"
        },
        .
        .
        .
        .
    ]
}

Each configuration file has two main components.

story

(required) A narrative to start your experience with. A tale of mystery and thrill.

puzzles

(required) List of puzzles designed by you which is what your friends would solve during the event.

story

Story itself has following components.

title

(required) An interesting title to your story.

text

(required) Narrative of the story or text of the story.

images

(optional) Set of images you might want to show to have a dramatic effect. NOTE: Each image should either be a URL or absolute path to an image stored on your device. NOTE: The key itself is not optional but the values are i,e campaigns should have this key for story but the values can be left empty as an empty list "[]"

puzzles

Each puzzle in the list of puzzles has the following components.

title

(required) An interesting title to your story.

text

(required) Narrative of the story or text of the story.

images

(optional) Set of images you might want to show to have a dramatic effect. NOTE: Each image should either be a URL or absolute path to an image stored on your device. NOTE: The key itself is not optional but the values are i,e campaigns should have this key for story but the values can be left empty as an empty list "[]"

hints

(optional) Set of hints you might want to give to your friends to help them understand/solve the puzzles you have set. NOTE: The key itself is not optional but the values are i,e campaigns should have this key for story but the values can be left empty as an empty list "[]"

answer

(requied) Answer to your puzzle. Keep it as a word or a number to avoid confusions.

JSONSchema Validation

You can find some example campaigns in examplecampaigns. We use https://python-jsonschema.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ to validate the correctness of the config file. The schema we validate it against can be found at jsonschema.

Contributing

Bug Reports and Feature Requests

Please use issue tracker for reporting bugs or feature requests.

Development

Pull requests are most welcome. New and fun campaigns are always eagerly awaited.

Buy the developer a cup of coffee!

If you found this package fun/useful you can buy me a cup of coffee using