Context and Goals

During the pandemic, in-person entertainment utterly halted. Hourglass had to pivot hard and fast to stay in business and our first option was to develop a new way to interact with our existing escape rooms. We strapped a goPro to our chests and ran people through the room as best we could. Immediately we found something missing, player interaction had disappeared entirely. Guiding a person through a puzzle was not, in fact, fun if you couldn’t also touch the puzzle. The novelty of escape rooms was lost in translation. So we set out on a mission with Mad Pharoah. How could we recreate the novelty that escape rooms bring to players with current restrictions? Mad Pharoah evolved entirely out of trying to recreate full player interaction across multiple locations in a browser based software, while also eliminating the dreaded alpha player.

Overview

At the beginning of the game, each player chooses a character to play. 8 “player desks'“ appear on a left scroll bar that all players have access to. To eliminate an alpha player, throughout the game as objects are found in the interactive panorama, only one player may receive an item.

Examples of Desk and Panorama

Examples of game in action