BETA testing has always been an important issue for our Escape Room. How do we ever know whether what we build will work? Like things in a book, what you imagine in your mind is always much better than the movie version in most cases. It’s a miracle that I have been lucky enough to find a partner in the escape room business who knows how to recreate what I have in my head. Working with the COO of the company has been a working project for over 10 years, and not all with Escape Rooms. We’ve been working partners in so many different projects, that it’s so easy for him to understand what I want in a sentence, or me to understand what he’s trying to create with a short gander.
However, even saying that is not enough to provide us with the validation of having a product that other people will like, although, we have yet to work on something together, where we produce a final product that people generally don’t like. I think that goes for any business partnership, finding the absolute right person to be able to share your work ethic, cares about the business, and in many ways can compliment & supplement your job at the same time. We knew that every time we were done building or creating something, we always take several looks at it. Anything remotely flawed by our product is immediately looked at to figure out how to prevent that small detail to become a big flaw later.
Even with our combined minds, nothing can ever get close to figuring out an escape experience, other than having people of all experience types come in and try it. Our philosophy - overdo, and then overdo some more. Put your all and then some into every game, and then slowly start to peel each layer, one by one, based on people’s feedback. For each of our games, we try to pack them with everyone we can think of, but in a way that makes sense, for the most part. All the good ideas, all the ideas that may work, and sometimes just to calibrate ourselves, some very questionable ideas. We run it for 2 weeks at a time and then ask for feedback. Based on what people say they like or don’t like, and with the success rate of the game, we start to take things out, re-shape the game, adjust, fix, rebuild, renew, re-theme in some cases, and then hopefully through a long enough process, get to the point where we feel like this is going to be the best version of what we initially wanted.
The end product always, for one reason or another, no matter how hard we try, is never quite exactly what we initially planned, but somewhere along the spectrum of change, it morphs itself into something that works. The best part of this “trial & error” process, is that we get better, and forevermore evolve ourselves, to think beyond just what we feel is the right product. Quan, our COO, and I have similar visions of what we want to create for our clientele. Making it work is always a struggle for us as a collective group, good or bad, the ideas of what could be from the public eye always fuel us, to push the envelope on how to create a truly immersive experience for our Escape Room customers. We invite everyone to come to play, provide feedback - we are always so appreciative of your thoughts, as we continue to work to bring you an experience that truly reflects the quality that is EDscapade Games.
We look forward to sharing our dreams with you, and can’t wait to provide the experience that only EDscapade Games can provide.