🕵️ EscRoomGames.com

EscRoomGames.com is a digital escape room platform and 4D game publisher that I created during the COVID-19 pandemic to prove to myself that I could pursue programming as a career. It offered immersive, browser-based escape room experiences with story-driven puzzles, real-world interactions, and unique gameplay mechanics.

🎮 Overview

EscRoomGames.com brought players into interactive digital adventures where they solved puzzles, cracked codes, and even made real phone calls or interacted with social media to progress through the story. All games were playable directly in the browser — no downloads or high-end hardware required.

Some of the published games included:

• Daffodil362 – Play as a CIA agent hunting down the cyber-terrorist Alabaster White.

  • 40+ puzzles, ~1.9-hour playtime, immersive story.
  • Approximately 100 players completed this game.

• I Want My Money Back – A comedic escape room poking fun at customer service frustrations.

  • About half as many players as Daffodil362, but well-received for its humor.

(Other planned games like Big Bank USA and Ghost Writer were never fully completed but had detailed designs inspired by crime heist narratives and horror classics like The Shining.)

⚙️ Technical Details

• Codebase: Vanilla JavaScript (each game over 30,000 lines of code)
• Frontend: Browser-based HTML/CSS/JS
• Gameplay Mechanics: Dynamic DOM manipulation to create puzzles, real-time interactions, and hidden clues
• Design Philosophy: Fully story-driven, immersive puzzles that require thinking outside the box and interacting with “real world” tools

This project taught me full-stack thinking and advanced DOM manipulation without relying on frameworks. The vanilla JS expertise I gained here has been invaluable in later projects that lean heavily on frameworks but occasionally need direct DOM handling for edge cases.

🌟 Achievements

• Successfully developed and released two completed digital escape rooms with hundreds of players.
• Over 4,000 hours of gameplay logged across all games.
• Built a fully browser-based gaming experience that required no downloads and ran on virtually any device.
• Learned advanced JavaScript, problem-solving, and game design skills independently before formal schooling.

🎯 Lessons Learned

• How to structure large-scale JavaScript projects from scratch.
• Implementing interactive, immersive gameplay with minimal resources.
• Balancing storytelling, user experience, and technical constraints in digital games.
• The value of hands-on learning: I went from teaching myself JS to earning top marks at Flatiron School and launching a career as a software engineer.

🔗 Playable Games

• Daffodil362 – Digital Cyberpunk Escape Room
• I Want My Money Back – Comedic Customer Service Adventure

💡 Summary

EscRoomGames.com was my first major coding project that combined creativity, logic, and programming under real-world constraints. It proved that I could design and ship large, complex applications independently, and it gave me a foundational understanding of JavaScript, web development, and interactive system design that I’ve carried into every software engineering project since.