While we’ve been working on our escape room project, one thing that I’ve had in the back of my mind is how, as part of our requirements, we need two physics based puzzles. Originally I had an idea to do something with a scale/balancing beam. This would allow the users to pick up items scattered around the room and sort them in specific ways based on their weights. The items would have rigid bodies attached to them that when placed on the scales would allow it to rotate freely around a central point. As I was getting ready to do this, I had a sudden burst of inspiration, a game of Plinko. Yes, a game from The Price is Right was about to solve all my problems.

I wanted to scatter a few balls around the room, so that the user could then find them and place them in the Plinko machine. The rigid bodies on them would then be subject to gravity which would cause them to bounce down the pegs. After their treacherous journey they would come to rest in a slot at the bottom of the machine. The question now was what to do with this.

In my most recent blog post I talked about creating a keypad object from scratch. Since then I had added the necessary code to get it working, but I still didn’t have a puzzle to set up the code that would be entered into it. This is where the Plinko machine came in clutch. I was able to create ten spaces at the bottom of it labeled 0-9. I set up four balls around the room to each have a separate color (red, blue, green, yellow). When the user places all four balls into the machine, the final resting spots of the balls get transmitted to the keypad. This then sets a code that the user enters to unlock one of the door’s three locks.

I had a lot of fun making and programming the Plinko machine, and to think I was going to go with scales.