We love escape rooms. Not only have we both played hundreds of them, we’ve also built a few before this project. Matt created Arcane Escape Rooms; Patrick created Evil Genius Escape Rooms. Both of us have won awards and had rooms ranked in the Top Escape Room Project, or TERPECA, with our highest rating being 7th in the world! So we combined forces to…

Make a video game. We competed in the GitHub Game Off with just one month to make a game. After a lot of work and sleepless nights, our game, Shot in the Dark, ended up placing. Out of the 553 entries, we ranked #1 in Audio and #2 Overall.

So what do you do after that? You combine the two concepts. We decided to make a video game/escape room hybrid. And Appleseed Avenue was born.

Patrick built the entire game on the Unity game engine, which controls everything: from all the lights in the space to the props to the music to the detective, medical, and game master computers. Everything.

But there was a crucial element missing in our puppet-murder game—the puppets. So Matt learned how to make puppets from scratch. He is responsible for making the 30+ unique puppet characters in the interactive world of Appleseed Avenue.

Appleseed Avenue is the most detailed and complicated project either of us has ever worked on. It has taken longer and offered more challenges than the two of us could have imagined at the outset. But we pushed through. Piece by piece, we created a place that is very special to us.

And we hope this place might be special for you as well.