Escape Key Project - C - Collar
The task this week was to create a font that could be disguised in some way and hidden on a lanyard.
Now, in my mind, for this project, the lanyard will be on a hook—and the hook features later on. On the end of the lanyard is a card that very obviously goes to an RFID puzzle, which is also later in this series. I’m quite excited about building that. It’s got a really, I think, clever word puzzle to decode for the letter that it’s going to reveal.
I wanted to create a lanyard font. By that, I mean a font that would sit on a lanyard and contain all of the letters bar one. We’ve talked in previous blog posts and on the podcast itself about the idea that you can reveal something either by showing everything or by strategically excluding one particular piece of information.
For example, with this strategy, I’m going to show 26 letters, and they’re going to be disguised—but in fact, I’ll remove one, so, there’ll only be 25. There are various ways you can do that, but for this task, I manipulated a font called Arcade, which I got for free from a website called dafont.com. It’s a really good resource for free and commercial fonts. You can filter your search depending on whether you want to use a font commercially or just freely—really useful if you're making a game that you want to sell. I chose a free font because I wanted to fully manipulate it and then remix it and release it.
The thing about the Arcade font is it comes in three different flavours: Interlaced, Normal, and Rounded. It’s really got that '70s–'80s computer vibe. It takes me back to my childhood—the Sinclair Spectrum, ZX81 with the rubber keys, everything on one keyboard. I loved it and I’m very nostalgic for it. I’m looking for that BBC Micro vibe, where everything was this dotty, dot-matrixy, granular font. Very visceral and much more tangible than a lot of the fonts we see today.
In terms of editing, I used Adobe Illustrator to manipulate the font. I typed the alphabet out in one long space, copied it, and reversed the letters. If you watch the accompanying video, you’ll see how I do this using Illustrator quite easily. I changed one line of fonts to a different colour to help with alignment, and then I explored various layout options.
I also did a lot of research on social media. I showed three different puzzles to three different groups of people and asked them to time themselves as they tried to decode what was missing. The feedback was really interesting. They shared how they approached the puzzle, what they noticed straight away, how long it took them—and there was a real range in timings: from 10 seconds (some people got it immediately) to five minutes (others were scanning closely, wondering if there was an Aztec theme or not).
What became clear from the testing was that the presentation of the letters significantly affects the challenge level. I want this lanyard to be the kind of challenge that appears right at the very end of the escape room game—when players think, “We’ve used everything. There are a few letters left. There must be something we’ve missed.” Hopefully, someone will pick up the lanyard and start recognising that there are actually letters on it.
The added challenge—something that came through clearly in the research—is double-checking yourself. The font works well. The puzzle works well. What doesn’t work quite as well is the letter placement. In this version, the missing letter is C. I chose this to tie in with other puzzles that correspond to letters of the alphabet. But C is very early in the alphabet, and that’s a problem.
If you're scanning to find a missing letter and it’s C, it doesn’t take long. A letter like J, T, or W would take longer because you’d have to get further through the alphabet before noticing its absence. I can imagine people playing this escape room game and going through the alphabet over and over—at least 20 times! You’d hear it on the recording: “A, B, C... Oh wait, C’s missing.”
In playtesting, many people found C quickly but then spent a lot of time double-checking. If you’re designing for a game with 25 puzzles and around two minutes per puzzle, this one—while clever—is perhaps a bit too quick to solve, or not quite challenging enough. It’s essentially a series of fairly poorly disguised alphabets. Some players spotted it instantly. Others had to go through the alphabet to be sure.
And that checking is crucial, because this is a fail-state escape room. There's one chance. If you guess wrong, you fail. So the stakes are high, and it’s designed to feel that way. That adds tension—even to the simpler puzzles.
If I were to revise this, I’d choose a letter further into the alphabet, to increase difficulty. And looking at the pictures, I think I missed a trick by not disguising the letters more—perhaps with patterns or sequences along the edges to make the alphabet harder to spot at first glance. That’s something for the future.
I hope you found this useful and beneficial. Tune in for the next instalment of the Escape Key project.
