MMMatthew Mercado
Selected work

01 / SAAS PLATFORM

Escape Director

A SaaS operations platform for escape room owners and game masters. Battle-tested across 8,000+ Room Sessions with 99.95% uptime, unlimited Rooms per location, and offline-ready Room Stations built for the realities of venue Wi-Fi.

Role
Founder & Lead Software Engineer
Timeline
2021 - Present
State
In active development
Escape Director interface

Inside the build

The decisions behind the experience.

01

Gamemaster Dashboard

Built for speed under pressure. Game masters control the timer, ordered puzzles and clues, audio, images, video, and the synchronized player-facing Live View from one workspace. Every action is timestamped in the Room Session log for later review.

02

Platform Architecture

TanStack Start and React power the frontend, backed by an Express 5 API and PostgreSQL with Prisma on Railway. Better Auth handles subscription-based access control, Stripe powers billing, and AWS S3 stores room media.

03

Offline-First PWA

Opening a Room online atomically prepares its current Room Revision, Application Shell, signed Offline Access Grant, and every configured audio, image, and video file. Once marked Offline ready, the Room Dashboard and same-station Live View can keep running for at least 24 hours; completed Room Sessions are saved locally and sync after reconnecting.

04

Room Analytics

Evidence-backed analytics turn each completed Room Session into Room-scoped performance views, with clear coverage and supporting numbers behind every result. PostgreSQL rollups power summaries by Room and date range, while detailed logs preserve success, timing, attendance, clue usage, notes, and the story of each game.

05

Analytics AI Assistant

Ask Analytics helps operators explore performance in plain language. It translates each question into approved, read-only metric queries while keeping Room scope, metric definitions, and supporting evidence intact.

Tools and systems

TanStack StartReactExpress 5PostgreSQLPrismaStripeRailwayBetter AuthAWS S3
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