MMMatthew Mercado
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Case 01SAAS PLATFORM

Escape Director

The operations platform I built and run for escape rooms. Game masters control the clock, clues, puzzles, media, and the players' screen from one dashboard, and the room keeps running when the venue's internet doesn't.

Role
Founder & Lead Software Engineer
Timeline
2023 – Present
Status
Live and growing
Links
Visit the live product Read the product guides
7,900+
Live games run on the platform
142,000+
Game actions logged
99.95%
Uptime over the trailing 12 months
Escape Director interface

01 The problem at the desk

An escape room runs on a 60-minute clock with players inside who are counting on it. Most venues juggle a timer app, a clue screen, and paper notes, and a dropped Wi-Fi connection can stall a live game. I had run rooms since 2017, so I built the tool I wanted at the game master's desk.

02 Inside the platform

Built for the countdown.

  1. One dashboard for the live game

    Game masters run the clock, ordered puzzles, clues, audio, images, video, and the synchronized player-facing Live View from one screen. Automations fire from solved puzzles, clock events, or a game master's command, and every action is timestamped in the session log for review afterward.

  2. Games that survive an outage

    Venue internet fails at the worst moments, so every room is built to run without it. Opening a room caches everything it needs, from media to a signed offline grant. The clock, clues and players' screen keep going with no connection, and finished games wait in a durable queue that syncs exactly once when the network returns.

  3. An AI assistant that earned the job

    Ask Analytics answers business questions in plain language and reshapes an operator's dashboard through schema-validated tool calls. Before it shipped, I ran 4 candidate models through the real production tool flow, 3 rounds and 72 turns each, with trace grading and blinded review, and picked the winner on quality, latency, and cost.

  4. Props that talk to the game

    An open-source, MIT-licensed Arduino SDK gives physical props state, command, and completion APIs with automatic pairing and reconnection, so a solved puzzle shows up on the dashboard instantly.

  5. A launch told in sixty minutes

    I rebuilt the public site around one game: scroll and the room clock runs from the door closing to the record on the lobby wall. I also built the launch film below in Remotion, animated in code and edited to the beat of the music. The short silent loops on the homepage come from the same footage.

03 Launch film

A Saturday night, start to finish.

The launch film Every feature in one cut, from the first clue to the lobby leaderboard, including the moment the internet drops and the game keeps going.

04 Live from the venue

One game, told by the clock
One game, told by the clock The homepage follows a single Saturday-night game. As you scroll, the room clock counts down and each feature shows up at the moment a game master would reach for it.
They escape
They escape Stopping the clock records the result, the time and the clues used, and the lobby leaderboard updates on its own.
Every room at a glance
Every room at a glance Owners run unlimited rooms from one browser app, each with its own duration, clue allowance, content, and live state.
Analytics
Analytics Cards for one room, rooms side by side, or game masters compared, with Ask Analytics beside them to answer plain-language questions and show the calculation behind each answer.

05 Under the hood

  • TanStack Start
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Express
  • Prisma
  • PostgreSQL
  • IndexedDB
  • Stripe
  • Vercel AI Gateway
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