Immersive Experience Design, Graphic Design, Identity & Branding
Always seeking to tell stories and share narratives across different media types, I’ve found that the emerging and unconventional immersive entertainment industry is especially filled with resonant, impactful, multidisciplinary works encouraging discovery through atmospheric worlds dynamic and enthralling. With this at heart, in 2017 I began the process of co-creating Olde City Escape Games (a boutique escape room venue located at the center of historic Philadelphia) to provide players with fun, meaningful, inclusive, visceral and memorable experiences in celebration of the City of Philadelphia.
As the creative-lead, I directed a team on the immersive game design, technology-driven interactions, space planning, interior and scenic design.
The design process was especially non-linear - a back and forth between story boarding and digital drafting, sourcing/salvaging, scenic painting/texturizing, hand lettering, furniture restoring, sound designing and musical scoring for seamless integration with fully-automated programmed puzzle interactions. The narratives are meticulously embedded into every custom detail to bring completely new imagined worlds (Benjamin Franklin’s parlor and secret print shop in A Quest for Freedom and an old-school boxing gym set in the City of Brotherly Love in The Midnighters) to life.
Olde City Escape Games officially opened in spring of 2018 and was ranked as #1 escape room by Best Things Pennsylvania in its first 5-months of opening. It remains a top tier immersive experience in the tri-state area.
I also guide the company's overarching brand strategy, web and graphic design for ongoing marketing campaigns via print and digital channels driving online SEO.
While the identity of Olde City Escape Games is inspired by its location in the historic district of Philadelphia and takes on a rustic character, its escape room games are decidedly more playful and experimental. The Midnighters game takes cues from 1980s B-rated teen adventure movies, while the Quest for Freedom game features colonial attributes, influenced by Benjamin Franklin’s drawings and print shop work. 2084 is a futuristic take on George Orwell’s 1984 and showcases a digital, dystopic feel.
OCEG Values
Olde City Escape Games take fun seriously. When people play together, they lower their guards. New friendships are borne when biases are abandoned and passion is shared in the collective goal of a game. This coupling of group problem solving with the urgency of competition is impactful in building relationships. So, as the future perpetually propels into the digital (wherein online friendships lack synchronicity and personal contact tend to go broader than deep), we’ve taken a different approach to our games, opting for agency in storytelling and participation through collective play in the fantastical and physical world of escape rooms.
By focusing our storytelling through environment, interaction, and critical thinking, escape games possess the ability to elicit broad emotions while fostering connection to others. Through techniques in script writing, lighting design, sound engineering, creative coding and automation, motion graphics, 3D-printing props, etc. we achieve a gamification where reality hybridizes theater, literature, emergent technologies, and a psychological dreamworld. From this multifaceted vantage, Olde City Escape Games positions itself toward a future of entertainment not exclusive to any one discipline.
We pride the escape room niche as belonging to a broad artistic industry because it is dynamic as it is creative. We love playing and creating escape rooms because we relish opportunities to experience what is present and visceral, explorative and peculiar, unifying and resonant. In focusing on both emergent technologies and escape rooms’s theatrical roots, our work augments stories and elevates engagement to bridge gaps in human connectivity. It’s through these experimental means that we push our storytelling in games and theater to design for greater human connection and shared joy.