EvscapeRoom

Contribution by Griatch, 2019

A full engine for creating multiplayer escape-rooms in Evennia. Allows players to spawn and join puzzle rooms that track their state independently. Any number of players can join to solve a room together. This is the engine created for ‘EvscapeRoom’, which won the MUD Coders Guild “One Room” Game Jam in April-May, 2019. The contrib has no game content but contains the utilities and base classes and an empty example room.

The original code for the contest is found at https://github.com/Griatch/evscaperoom but the version on the public Evennia demo is more updated, so if you really want the latest bug fixes etc you should rather look at https://github.com/evennia/evdemo/tree/master/evdemo/evscaperoom instead. A copy of the full game can also be played on the Evennia demo server at https://demo.evennia.com - just connect to the server and write evscaperoom in the first room to start!

Introduction

Evscaperoom is, as it sounds, an escaperoom in text form. You start locked into a room and have to figure out how to get out. This engine contains everything needed to make a fully-featured puzzle game of this type!

Installation

The Evscaperoom is installed by adding the evscaperoom command to your character cmdset. When you run that command in-game you’re ready to play!

In mygame/commands/default_cmdsets.py:


from evennia.contrib.full_systems.evscaperoom.commands import CmdEvscapeRoomStart

class CharacterCmdSet(...):

  # ...

  self.add(CmdEvscapeRoomStart())

Reload the server and the evscaperoom command will be available. The contrib comes with a small (very small) escape room as an example.

Making your own evscaperoom

To do this, you need to make your own states. First make sure you can play the simple example room installed above.

Copy evennia/contrib/full_systems/evscaperoom/states to somewhere in your game folder (let’s assume you put it under mygame/world/).

Next you need to re-point Evennia to look for states in this new location. Add the following to your mygame/server/conf/settings.py file:

  EVSCAPEROOM_STATE_PACKAGE = "world.states"

Reload and the example evscaperoom should still work, but you can now modify and expand it from your game dir!

Other useful settings

There are a few other settings that may be useful:

  • EVSCAPEROOM_START_STATE - default is state_001_start and is the name of the state-module to start from (without .py). You can change this if you want some other naming scheme.

  • HELP_SUMMARY_TEXT - this is the help blurb shown when entering help in the room without an argument. The original is found at the top of evennia/contrib/full_systems/evscaperoom/commands.py.

Playing the game

You should start by looking around and at objects.

The examine <object> command allows you to ‘focus’ on an object. When you do you’ll learn actions you could try for the object you are focusing on, such as turning it around, read text on it or use it with some other object. Note that more than one player can focus on the same object, so you won’t block anyone when you focus. Focusing on another object or use examine again will remove focus.

There is also a full hint system.

Technical

When connecting to the game, the user has the option to join an existing room (which may already be in some state of ongoing progress), or may create a fresh room for them to start solving on their own (but anyone may still join them later).

The room will go through a series of ‘states’ as the players progress through its challenges. These states are describes as modules in .states/ and the room will load and execute the State-object within each module to set up and transition between states as the players progress. This allows for isolating the states from each other and will hopefully make it easier to track the logic and (in principle) inject new puzzles later.

Once no players remain in the room, the room and its state will be wiped.

Design Philosophy

Some basic premises inspired the design of this.

  • You should be able to resolve the room alone. So no puzzles should require the collaboration of multiple players. This is simply because there is no telling if others will actually be online at a given time (or stay online throughout).

  • You should never be held up by the actions/inactions of other players. This is why you cannot pick up anything (no inventory system) but only focus/operate on items. This avoids the annoying case of a player picking up a critical piece of a puzzle and then logging off.

  • A room’s state changes for everyone at once. My first idea was to have a given room have different states depending on who looked (so a chest could be open and closed to two different players at the same time). But not only does this add a lot of extra complexity, it also defeats the purpose of having multiple players. This way people can help each other and collaborate like in a ‘real’ escape room. For people that want to do it all themselves I instead made it easy to start “fresh” rooms for them to take on.

All other design decisions flowed from these.

This document page is generated from evennia/contrib/full_systems/evscaperoom/README.md. Changes to this file will be overwritten, so edit that file rather than this one.