An escape room's game console, rebuilt after one crash too many mid-game
Four rooms of props ran on hobbyist software that froze about once every busy Saturday. We rewrote the controller so a room keeps running even when the console drops.
This shows the kind of work we do. It is not a client engagement, and the business in it is invented.
- 1crash in six months, and that was a cleaner unplugging a Pi
- 1 secbetween a prop changing state and the console showing it
- 4 roomsrun from a single tablet
Where it started
The problem
Four rooms, each with a sixty-minute clock and around a dozen props wired to a Raspberry Pi. The software tying it together was written by a hobbyist who'd since moved to Oregon.
On a busy Saturday it crashed about once. The clock froze and the hint screen went black. Then the game master had to run in and reset a room with six frustrated people standing in it.
What changed
What we did
We rewrote the room controller as a small service on each Pi, with a game-master console on a tablet that talks to all four. If the console drops, the room keeps running and the clock keeps counting.
Props report their state every second. When a maglock fails to release, the game master sees it on the tablet before the players have finished tugging the handle.
We added a log of which hints get asked for, puzzle by puzzle. The owners redesigned the worst puzzle in room two because of it.
Nothing new to buy, either. Every prop and every Pi stayed exactly where it was.
Built with
- Raspberry Pi
- Python
- MQTT
- Vue.js
- SQLite
Services in this job
Application Development
Any stack, any server, start to finish
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