While I haven’t kept up with the genre, to my knowledge (from playing The Crimson Room and its sequels around a decade ago), the hallmarks of an escape room game are to find and combine items, solve puzzles, and escape from the area you’re trapped in. While this area is traditionally a fairly small room, that doesn’t really work in a sprite-based 2D game, especially if there’s a monster that you need to run away from. That was the basis for the hub-and-spoke design of the complex in Atticus Complex.

Each colored section of the map is connected to the central room and the adjacent sections by long hallways. The doors connecting to the central room will announce whenever you enter or leave an area, letting the monster know where you are; the announcements also play when the monster uses the doors, allowing you to prepare for it.

I originally planned for the only safe places to be the white rooms between sections, forcing you to close the emergency shutters until the monster leaves, but had to abandon the idea due to a glitch. For some reason that I never learned the cause of, when activating the shutters, the player character became completely unable to move. To make up for it now being easier to escape the monster, I added a “cornered” clause, in which if the monster reaches the entrance to a room and you’re still inside, it will automatically rush you.

Each area was meant to be a lab in which different types of experiments were performed, but I lost several hours chasing down bugs, so puzzles were scrapped, some areas weren’t as fleshed-out as originally intended, and an entire area ended up going unused. While copy/pasting a bunch of boxes was enough to transform Area 8 into a storage room, I just didn’t have the time to work on Area 3, so it was just left as a big, empty room that you only ever need to visit if you want one of the memos. For the record, it was originally meant to be a physics lab.

Time limitations also meant that the puzzles and solutions that DID make it into the game had to be tweaked a bit. For example, the box of matches was originally a handheld laser, which you could use as a simple light emitter, use to burn things, and use to cut things, depending on the situation. The broken door leading to Area 8 was originally meant to have a broken green laser emitter, so you would have to create the green liquid, put it in a square container so that light would pass through it in a straight line, then combine thermo putty and conductive putty (scrapped items from electrical and physics lab puzzles) to form an epoxy and mount the hand laser within the door panel. To finish the game within the game jam’s time limit, I was forced to make the solution just placing the green liquid in the panel.

You were also originally intended to make gunpowder for a bomb, which you can still see references to in a book on making charcoal, a memo that mentions gunpowder, and two items that are described as having sulfur and potassium nitrate components. If I decide to complete this game after judging for the game jam ends (which I very well might), I’ll probably reincorporate some of the scrapped puzzles, and make the bomb necessary to get the true ending.