Sam Beavis and Sally Johnson from Wolf Escape Games join me for this week’s Meet Your Maker. Between them, they wield a killer skillset that makes them a force to be reckoned with in the online escape space. We explore what goes into making an award-winning cinematic online escape room, the importance of evolving gameplay and the very recent launch of their third game which features Sherlock Holmes!
Let’s start with introductions…
We are Sam Beavis and Sally Johnson, co-founders of Wolf Escape Games. It is very much our full-time job 🙂 Our spare time can be a bit limited depending on where we are in our release schedule! But outside of Wolf I love visiting interesting places, from science museums to stately homes. I also love a big hill with epic views. Sally loves the outdoors, wild camping, making fires and walking Che. We both love Strictly Come Dancing. Pure joy!
What is Wolf and how did it come about?
Before Wolf, Sally and I ran a successful corporate animation company but it never properly pushed our creative buttons. During lockdown, my sister sent us a link to an online escape room that we played together. It was basically a Google form! But in spite of its simplicity we had a great time over Zoom and pretty much immediately thought – we might be able to improve on the format of this…
What do you each bring to the table?
We’ve both had extensive creative careers before Wolf so we’re lucky to be able to cover a lot of bases between us. Sally was a singer-songwriter and composer for TV and advertising, which is why the games have such an awesome soundtrack! She’s also a graphic designer and artist so she handles the UI as well as making all the clues and artefacts in the game.
I began as a video editor/camera operator and then had a long stint as an animator, both 2D and 3D so I handle more of the environment creation, lighting and cinematics. For Wolf, I learnt coding which is where Sally drew the line! As for the game design and storytelling, we’re a bit of a hive-mind there. It’s our favourite part to do together, usually while walking back and forth across London.
Your first game Hallows Hill is a spooky mystery set in a creepy manor. I was blown away by the production value and polish for a debut game. How long does it take to turn an idea into a finished game?
Thank you! So the process is getting…. quicker. Haha. When we started it really was a case of ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’. There weren’t many examples out there of what we had in mind for a browser-based game. So we spent a long time experimenting. How would people navigate? How would they collaborate? How do you make the puzzles integral to the story and not just tacked on top? Those sorts of things took a while to figure out. Now we have a few games under our belt it’s a lot easier to predict how long each part of the process will take. Sherlock is the first game that we’ve set an official deadline for that we’ve actually made! It took us about 8 months.
When translating the idea to reality, did you have to make many significant changes to the original concept?
Lots! Game development is very naturally iterative. Having a great idea is really just a jumping-off point. So much of the work we do comes once we test those ideas in practice. There’s nothing quite like watching someone play a puzzle that you just made. You can quickly tell if it’s working or not! It ends up being a constant back and forth between idea generation and problem-solving until finally it all slots together.
Your second game, Miami Bay, was a complete shift in genre and tone. Was it a conscious choice to do something completely different?
That’s a great question! We did want to show some variety and make something that established us as more than ‘the haunted house people.’ We also wanted to see what a different theme would do in terms of attracting a new audience. And we’ve done that again with Sherlock really. So we now have an interesting blend of players coming to the games for different reasons which is great. All that said, I’m sure we will return to spooky vibes at some point. It is a great genre and people really do seem to like it.
Was the development easier the second time around or did it pose new challenges?
Hmmm, yes and no! We tried quite a lot of new things with Miami. For example – we had our first on-screen character! That ended up being pretty complicated but we do love a challenge! Miami Bay also got quite big in the end, a lot bigger than Hallows, which created its own pressures. If Hallows taught us how to make an online escape game, I’d say Miami taught us how to produce one.
Your latest game, Sherlock Homes: Phantom’s Hour, has just been released. Is this an original story or based on an existing one?
It’s an original story set in the world of Sherlock Holmes. We did a lot of research. In particular, there’s a great series of BBC radio plays from the early 1990s that were a fantastic inspiration for tone of voice. The original Sherlock stories are, of course, wonderful, however, they don’t necessarily lend themselves to being told through escape-room puzzles. Instead, we tried to capture the atmosphere of Victorian London and the familiarity of Sherlock and Watson’s voices so that players feel like it could have been based on one of the original stories.
Aside from the changes in story and genre, how do you keep gameplay fresh?
I think I lot of it comes down to puzzle disguise. We never want players to think ‘I know this one.’ So even though the underlying mechanics of a puzzle might be similar, we try to use the environment and story to create an input or a clue that will surprise players and make them re-evaluate what’s going on. It’s a lot like with real-life escape rooms. There’s a joy in entering a well-designed space, seeing a cool artefact, and saying as a team ‘Right, what do we do with this then??‘ That’s the feeling we’re looking for.
We’ve updated the UI a bit to make it, hopefully, more intuitive to explore different views. Most of the new mechanics work has gone into puzzles. Being set in 1896 of course means no screens and no electricity! So we had a lot of fun coming up with different puzzle interfaces. My favourite is an old Underwood typewriter that I hope is as fun to use as it was to make!
From a technical view, are you able to use the framework of previous games as a starting point for new projects?
We’re getting there! To an extent, there is an underlying framework that we can now reuse and it’s getting better with each release. Things like the save system, UI, digital backpack etc are now a lot more modular which gives us a great platform to start a new game. Making Sherlock was by far our most streamlined process so we’re hoping to build on that again for game 4. We have so many different ideas that we really want to be able to make games faster!
Have you considered enhancing replayability with different endings or dynamic puzzles that change each time you play?
We do get asked this quite a bit 🙂 We would love to make the games more open-ended. We’re big fans of that in other game genres. It’s a real can of worms though, to be honest! Especially because of the hand-crafted nature of our games when it comes to clues, artefacts etc. We dabbled a little bit with alternate storylines in Miami Bay and saw how they can exponentially grow! I’m sure it’s something we’ll return to though with the right story. That said, it’s been really surprising to us just how replayable the games are in their current format. I forget literally every puzzle in about 2 weeks.
Have you toyed with the idea of any episodic content at all?
That’s an interesting one. We have, we’ve just never quite figured out how that would work in practice. It’s also hard to say whether that would make the production process harder or easier, to be honest. We have said that Sherlock and Watson will return though….
What‘s next for Wolf?
Well… we’re going to have a little rest up until the end of the year 🙂 We also have an exciting new development we’re working on to make the games fully multiplayer! We have a retreat planned for the end of January where the plan for Game 4 will be taking shape…
A Stranger Things or Harry Potter experience from Wolf would be amazing. Have you explored the idea of collaborating at all?
Without naming names, we have had some conversations with streaming companies. It would really depend on the IP and how it fits with our creative approach. But yes, we’d definitely be keen. Sally and I are both absolute film and TV buffs so the list of dream projects is pretty long! We are both huge Harry Potter fans, so if we get the letter from Hogwarts, we’re packing our chests! We love creating our own worlds and stories though, so we’re happy either way.
What games do you enjoy playing?
Neither of us has had much time for gaming lately! As you can probably tell from our style, we love cinematic adventure games. Uncharted 4 was pretty much perfect. Sally loved The Last of Us because it’s basically playing a movie. I loved the Telltale Walking Dead series. There was some great storytelling in there. I also replayed Oxenfree recently which I thought was great. It reminded me of the LucasArts games I played as a kid.
Anything you would like to add?
Thank you for showing an interest in what we do! When we started out we really weren’t sure what people would make of our take on online escape games. We’ve been completely blown away by how many people write to us to tell us how much fun they had playing with their friends and family and how much they are looking forward to the next game. It’s a real privilege and we’re excited to keep making as many new adventures for everyone as we can.
Thank you!
Sam and Sally have been extremely busy lately preparing for the launch of their new game, so I’m really grateful to them for taking the time to speak to me. I hope you enjoyed the insights they gave into the world of online escape room design!
Sherlock Holmes: Phantom’s Hour is available worldwide – right now! I’ll be sharing my review in the coming weeks, but having played one of their previous games I have no doubt it will be fantastic.
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