Door puzzle ideas...

[monkey424]

Stu, did you see the recent NY Times article on real-life Escape the Room experiences? Apparently, they're popping up in a few of the bigger cities in the United States. You get locked in with a team to get yourself out of the room, and if you don't get yourself out, they unlock you in an hour. Sounded fun!

Indeed it is fun! You can read about my real-life room escape adventures in this earlier post:
http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=49119.msg636477079#msg636477079

[Chicky]

It goes so slowly because every time I make progress, I level up in drawing ability and start over! I haven't even started learning to program really yet, and I've been here for years.

Eric, go careful with that. Soon you'll be 11 years in and have re-designed and rebuilt your game 4 times. 

Besides, the puppet door has to be the most original approach to the locked door puzzle i've come across. Fantastically creative!

[Eric]

Ten ideas fresh off the idea wagon:

1. Door will only open when a drop of a rare blood type is submitted. You have no way to test, so you must convince reluctant NPCs to donate a finger prick.

2. A door with an intricate geometric pattern and a mathematical clue to figure out a specific point of intersection that needs to be pushed to unlock it. Pushing the wrong place shuffles the pattern and changes the clue.

3. A lock based in color mixing, but using theatrical gels and the physics of additive light instead of traditional pigment mixing (e.g. red + green = yellow).

4. A locked door with a transom through which can be seen a mirror reflecting the other side of the door. Manipulating the locks on your side of the door changes a pattern on the other, but the player must remember the matching pattern is reversed, due to the mirror.

5. A timed door lock for which you must die, appear as a specter to NPCs on the other side, and convince them to unlock the door and revive you before death is permanent (a meat locker might be useful here).

6. A "living" door that must be repaired surgically -- arteries cut and sutured -- before it is healthy enough to open.

7. A door that is actually the back of a giant. You must consult ancient tomes and compose a lullaby in the giant's mother tongue to lull it to sleep / move it away from the door.

8. A door that is flush with the wall such that only an outline shows. This door does not move, the rest of the room shifts around it.

9. A door on a television or film set that is legitimately not unlockable, but players must instead walk around the edge of the set that is visible in the foreground (ala Frank Drebbin on Police Squad).

10. A door with a colored object puzzle ironically guarded by a colorblind guard for whom you must collect technically wrongly colored, but easily confusable items (like a green Granny Smith apple to satisfy a slot for a red object).

[faerieevenstar]

What about a puzzle where the door isn't actually there and you have to create the door in order to open in? If that makes any sense at all... I'm imagining some sort of magical door, not a doorway exists without a door, and you have to build a door to put in a hole to open it, because that makes NO SENSE.

I suppose a bit like Penny Crayon, where anything she drew came to life, so you have to draw the door with a magic pen (ooh yes, wasn't there a puzzle in a Kings Quest game to enter the castle with magic paint to make a door?!?) Or like Wiley Coyote's painted tunnels!

Or you have to construct a door with many inventory items and say a spell or do a dance or something to make it become real.

Perhaps I'm thinking too obscure here!

[Eric]

I like it in a philosophical way -- you can't pass a barrier that doesn't exist, so to transcend them, you have to first create them.

[Mouth for war]

Maybe something with a scale...you must put the exact weight to get it open...I dunno

[Eric]

A meta-physical scale that weighs your soul, and you have to do good deeds until your soul is light enough to pass.

[Stupot]

I suppose a bit like Penny Crayon, where anything she drew came to life, so you have to draw the door with a magic pen.

There's that chalk door scene in Beetlejuice. :-)

[CaptainD]

A meta-physical scale that weighs your soul, and you have to do good deeds until your soul is light enough to pass.

There MUST be an Egyptian theme to the area this door is in.   Another door in this area could have you solving the Sphinx's riddle to get through (cliché I know, but...)

[Stupot]

Maybe you're in a room with a sarcophagus and you have to climb in it and shut the lid to trigger some spiritual acid trip in which you must solve a psychadelic hieroglyphics-based code presented to you by some long-dead pharaoh. And then you wake up in the box and have to find a switch in the dark to let you out, then you can go to the door and enter the correct glyphs on some panel.

[Ben X]

Another door in this area could have you solving the Sphinx's riddle to get through (cliché I know, but...)

Except the Sphinx insists that it's NOT Man, and you have to use an encyclopedia to look up a rare lizard that actually changes its number of legs throughout the day.