Creator of the Week: Adventure & team-building game Wreck Havoc
By: Esmeé Xavier
Tags: Team Building, Appgyver, Web App Development, Creator Spotlight, Escape Games

Ethan Rodriguez-Torrent and the team at Escape New Haven have been creating adventures through escape games since 2014. Now, they’re providing virtual team-building experiences, with the collaborative “mega-game” Wreck Havoc. For a crucial part of gameplay, Ethan successfully developed a web application in AppGyver, and embedded it into gaming platform Gather.

Give us a bit of background for this project.

We do traditional escape rooms, but obviously this isn’t the year for that, so we’ve taken our large scale team building game that we used to bring to corporate events and hotels, that kind of thing, and we brought it online, so the app is part of that.

The game involves splitting a group into different teams, and those teams have to cooperate, coordinate and negotiate. Teams work together on a ship, and they have to buy equipment that protects the whole ship. The way that we do the purchases, trades, money changing hands, equipment, and all of that is done through the app. So the app lives in the virtual space, it’s kind of the backbone for how all of the transactions happen.

Do you have a programming background?

No, not really. In the spring I learned enough Python to make something functional, like a script server that we wrote for our booking software, but that’s pretty much it. I realized that if i had to learn Javascript to a level that was actually production ready, it would probably take me several months.

Why was AppGyver the right fit?

I didn’t realize that the whole no-code space existed before. Someone directed me towards Firebase, but that was assuming I had a lot of knowledge that I didn’t have. So I was looking around and slowly honed in on the no- and low-code terms. I demoed a couple different tools and AppGyver seemed to be the most thought-out and fleshed-out. Also the free-forever promise was really important because you don’t want to spend a lot of time building something and then find a paywall, and you can’t edit anymore.

How was the building process?

Starting an app like this, with a multiplayer requirement, there was a fairly steep learning curve because I had to integrate the database and make sure that everyone had access, or if I changed something on one end, it would show up on the other. I probably should have started with a simpler app, that was single user-facing, and didn’t require a database. The forums are helpful though, and the team is really responsive, which is awesome.

It took me a while to figure out different quirks in AppGyver, like there are some parts that assume some Javascript background. Learning the functions, I figured out that I had to learn about Javascript operators, and stick those in.

Ultimately it was learnable, and I made something that I’m happy with — and it works!

How has the app impacted the player experience?

What we used to do is if someone wanted to make a trade with another team, they had to literally submit a Google form, and I would be on the backend seeing these form requests and fulfilling them manually, which was horrible. Everyone had to wait, and I was really busy because I had to be out there, helping people with puzzles and making sure the game was going smoothly. It was truly terrible, which is why I spent so much time making this app. It’s improved things vastly, and it made the game possible to run as a production.

Do you have plans to create more apps in the future?

I’ve been messing around on my own time with a 2D game that uses WASD controls, it’s also meant to be multiplayer — and that I made in a day or so. It’s so cool AppGyver has this use case as well. Right now you just get points when you move, so it’s not ready yet, but it’s actually running from a database.

I wouldn’t have thought of it, but I was talking to someone on the forums about a way to sort of fake keyboard input, so I’m using a zero opacity input block over this whole thing that allows it. I never would have thought of that if it wasn’t for someone mentioning it on the forums. There’s a regular group of AppGyver users helping there as well as the team, and that’s been crucial.

There are other projects I want to do to make things easier for our staff, like operating pre- and post-game procedures, and streamlining these into apps rather than a list of instructions. I also want to make new games for our players because at least for the next 6 months or so, or longer, people are going to be exclusively online.