More Ways to Create Virtual Escape Rooms: New Scenario Builder Template

Kyla Ball February 8, 2024

Creating a Virtual Escape Room is now even easier with ThingLink’s Scenario Builder ready-made template!

Escape rooms (sometimes called breakout rooms) have surged in popularity over the past few years. These problem-solving, team-building activities offer a unique blend of riddles, gameplay, and teamwork that captivates participants. Traditionally a physical escape room experience, we’re now witnessing a huge surge in popularity of the online escape room variant. These allow for remote teams to engage in these captivating puzzles.

However, versatile escape rooms that are designed so that they be used either in teams, OR as a solo participant, are a great way to build gamification and a sense of time pressure into any course or training.

Enter ThingLink’s Scenario Builder, an easy-to-use tool for designing branched learning scenarios. We have now created 4 new scenario templates, which make it even easier to create online training from scratch. One of these is the Escape Room format. So if you’ve ever fancied creating your own virtual escape room, this tutorial is for you!

Why Virtual Escape Rooms?

Recently, social media has been abuzz with virtual team-building activities. The physical escape room transformed into the virtual escape room, combining the allure of video games with the social aspects of traditional escape games. These digital variants maintain the core essence: problem-solving skills, riddles, and team collaboration, often conducted over Zoom or similar video conferencing platforms. To explain the concept simply, the “escapee” has to answer questions correctly in order to proceed, and ultimately escape. Take a look at this example below which shows how the escape room principle works in action when built in ThingLink Scenario Builder.

New to ThingLink? Here’s a quick guide to creating your first interactive scene

How to create an Escape Room in the main ThingLink Editor

In the popular blog How to Make a Virtual Escape Room, we showed you how easy it is to make a ThingLink escape room using just a few 360 scenes and the handy transit tag.

Using Scenario Builder gives you an alternative format and functionality, which is particularly suited to anyone creating an escape room for learning and training content. With Scenario Builder you can easily track the route and progress that your learners took and which choices they made or answers they gave at each decision point.

Getting Started with ThingLink’s Scenario Builder

We have designed four main types of Scenario Builder templates: Linear, Escape room, Simulation Scenario and Self-Exploratory. They all work in slightly different ways. To learn about them all, see our blog ThingLink Scenario Builder Templates for Effective Employee Training.

The Escape Room template has been designed so that anyone can create their first Virtual Escape Room from scratch without any need to work out which elements go where! Simply follow our template and you will have a challenging puzzle for friends, family or colleagues to play. Swap out our dummy scenes for your own ThingLink scenes and edit the questions to suit your theme.

Your final escape room will behave something like this example below, with questions which have to be answered to move to each new section or scene.

How to use the Scenario Builder escape room template

To find and use the template, follow these simple steps.

• Log into your ThingLink account

• Go to Scenarios in the sidebar

• Choose the Create Scenario button

• Type in the name of your new scenario

• When Let’s Get Started screen appears, choose the Escape Room template

• Simply replace our dummy content with your own text, questions, branching and media! 

Going further with your Scenario Builder Escape Room

1. Choose a Theme: From Harry Potter to murder mystery, your escape room’s theme is its heart. This determines the questions, any riddles or trivia, and overall feel of the game.
2. Incorporate Gameplay Elements: Gamification elements like countdown timers and scores can be integrated. Only the correct answer should allow progression to the next stage.
3. Include a Tutorial: New players? Include a quick guide explaining how the game works. This can be a simple FAQs section covering game mechanics.
4. Interactivity is Key: Make use of ThingLink’s interactive features. This can mean clickable clues, embedded video snippets, or other gamified elements Embedding video from platforms like YouTube or Vimeo can enhance this. For instance, a clue might require players to watch a specific YouTube video with questions later in the scenario!
5. Escape Room Ideas & Variants: Beyond traditional riddles, you can design escape room games like scavenger hunts. The more creative you get, the better!
6. Team Collaboration: Encourage teamwork. For example, split a virtual team into groups, each working on different clues. They can discuss their findings before attempting each “escape”.
7. Feedback: Once players finish the escape game, you could embed a Google Form for feedback. This helps in refining gameplay, fixing any issues, and understanding player preferences.
8. Adjust Difficulty: Not all players are escape room veterans. Offering difficulty levels, or including a hint system, can make your digital escape room more accessible.

Extra Tips for an Engaging Virtual Escape Room

• Reusability: Maybe you’ve created a ‘murder mystery’ template, which can be adjusted slightly for a different storyline, saving time and effort.
• Incorporate Popular Culture: From movies or TV shows to famous video games, popular culture themes can attract a wider audience and a framework of reference.

Let’s go!

ThingLink’s Scenario Builder has made the creation of interactive experiences super easy. With this escape room Scenario Builder template, crafting your virtual escape room is now easier than ever, blending problem solving, teamwork, and the allure of escape room games into one digital package. The key is creativity, ensuring a balance between challenge and fun.

In this era, where remote team activities are the new norm, your ThingLink virtual escape room can be a fantastic bridge, connecting people in an engaging, gamified environment. Dive into ThingLink today and let the adventures begin!

Get inspired

For more inspiration and user-generated examples, why not join our groups and communities on social media?

• LinkedIn Community
• X / Twitter Creative Learning Design Community
• ThingLink Education Facebook Group