Eleven Puzzles

The last three months were very busy. We had many more reviews, all of them are linked on our main page: https://elevenpuzzles.com/. They were so positive we were at the 1st place (of 400+) online room ranking: https://escapethereview.co.uk/location/online/. Currently, we sit at 4th place, which is absolutely insane.

The game is 100% on autopilot now. The whole buy/play process is automated, the product is stable and for the last 2 months, we had zero support tickets. Yay!

In the background, we're growing the list of newsletter subscribers. We decided that we'll ask our player's to leave their e-mail if they want to be notified when the next game is out. A lot of them do sign up, so now we have a few hundred potential customers of our next game!

Speaking of the next game, we're working on the next chapter of the story. We're done with the outline and most of the puzzles, but more on that soon...

Despite the great reception and sales way above what we expected, there is still a lot of work to do before it becomes a real, stable business. So in the near future, we plan to position ourselves as a great team-building exercise for corporate clients. The game is battle-tested now, so we're ready for expansion!

After the first sale more started flowing in. Every feedback we got was extremely positive. Our confidence grew. So we started reaching out to reviewers, asking if they'd be interested in playing our game. One responded, her name was Mairi. She played on Decembed 28th, reviewed the game shortly after.

The review can be found here: https://theescaperoomer.com/2021/01/02/eleven-puzzles-unboxing-the-mind-of-a-cryptic-killer/. It's a very positive one. Mairi, if you're reading this, thank you so much! You have no idea how much your kind words mean to us!

Wow, that was quick! Of course our family bought the game immediately, but this person was the first real customer. He played the game short after and e-mailed us right away. This is what he wrote:

"Our group of four have played an escape room every Monday since lockdown and yours was easily the best we've done.

Brilliant forced interaction with our team, decent puzzles and the five minute timer at the end is a stroke of genius!

Please let us know when you've got a new one as it'll be a same day purchase for us."

Rob, if you ever read this, you are a LEGEND. This e-mail means so much to us! I considered framing it!

After months of hard work, after hundreds of late hours spend working on the game, after focusing every weekend on pushing the development forward the launch day has come!

We decided to do a soft-launch. The webiste is https://elevenpuzzles.com

We wanted the users discover the game slowly. We started focusing on our Instagram and Facebook profile, sent the game to friends and family. Invested a small amount of money on Facebook Ads and AdWords. And waited.

Feedback from our friends and family was so positive that we decided to really give it a go. Initially we thought it's going to be a small side-project, but this changed right here.

If it was going to work, we had to really commit. Do the game right. No shortcuts, no bandaids, just do it right. Make a product we can be proud of.

So we hired a professional graphic artist, who coincedenly also loves escape rooms and is our long-time friend!

We're all in. We invested our own private money. We commited to finishing the product. We had a great feedback from testers. We reworked the game 100 times after user feedback. It has to work!

Why LLC company?

Apart from the long-term benefits of having a company, we wanted to make it real. Sink or swim.

After a few months we had all game mechanics working. The puzzles were there, graphics were still temporary (drawn by me!), almost no game sound, but it was ready for testing.

We asked all our friends and family to test the game. Provided them with instructions, we even sat down with them and worked on the game with them.

And you know what? I'm glad that we did. We found so many problems: in game mechanics, in puzzles themselves, in pacing, in puzzle difficulty, even in progress feedback. There was so many issues we didn't think about earlier, but our testers directly or indirectly pointed them out.

After brainstorming for a while, we had a general game framework that we wanted to implement. First and foremost, the missing component in other online escape rooms was COOPERATION. We were sure it's the missing ingrediend, the thing that we really wanted and enjoyed in escape rooms. For us, escape rooms were a social experience first and foremost, theme and puzzles come later.

Thus we decided to build our game around coopeation. 2 player minimum, no single player. Risky!

The first puzzle embodied exactly that. It was designed for 2 players on 2 different devices, ideally calling each other via Skype or something similar. Puzzle was impossible to solve by a single player. Players not only had to exchange information, they had to work together and coordinate their actions to find the solution.

I coded the puzzle and asked some friends to test it out. Boy, what a positive response! They all loved it, especially the fact that the game forced them to work together.

Fun fact: this puzzle is the very first riddle players have to solve in the finished game. It works as a tutorial, because it perfectly shows what the game is about!

We always loved escape rooms, but when pandemic struck, we couldn't feed our passion. So we turned to online versions, played a lot of them, but felt like something was missing. The itch was not scratched...

So we decided to build an online escape room that we'd like to play ourselves!