Written by: Calvin Kammer
Hey there, I’m Calvin. I’m a game designer that lives in Fresno, California. In 2019 I launched Next-Gen Escape with my partner in business and life Kiara Hill. I started Next-Gen while I was wrapping up my degree at Fresno State and learned countless lessons along the way.
We’ve created dozen of different escape games; award winning escape rooms and innovative and mobile Escape Crates, and have previously done virtual escape rooms and even the region’s first outdoor escape room.
I’ve consulted with other escape rooms and even worked with a datenight subscription box to create a date-night escape room that was shipped worldwide!
I have a lot of fun creating, designing, and playing escape games and together with Kiara we still run the escape room and expect it to do well for itself for the foreseeable future.
A slight problem with the escape room business is that you can only have a finite amount of escape rooms in a single space! You see, for someone that always thinks of new games and has the passion to do it having limited space can be inhibitive.
In a 3,400sqft building we can house about 5 escape rooms. I guess we never really thought about what would happen when we get to our max capacity, because now we either have to close a game (and never have it be played again) or wait and save up enough money to get a new place. Let me tell you, the wait is killing me.
As a game creator I get quite bored if I’m not making something, and it’s cost-prohibitive to close down an escape room “just because I want to make a new game.”
Enter: Griffin Games Studio.
I’ve created games of all kinds since I was young, and have probably just as many reasons for wanting to make games as you do.
Now that I am a part of this team I am excited to share with you the games that I’ve always wanted to play, but they’ve just been trapped in my head!
With everyone’s complimentary skills I feel confident that we will be able to make fun games that we’d want to play at our board game nights.
It also helps that we are all friends and have worked together before!
Each of us have our own backgrounds, tastes and preferences, which probably means you can expect a variety of content from Griffin Games in the future.
Thanks for reading, I’m still very much getting my “writer’s voice” down. I’d love to come back to this post and see how far the studio has come, so consider this blogpost a time capsule of Calvin in '22.
My goal is to write a blog everyday, to build up that writer’s voice, and to jot down the millions of ideas going through my head in a given day.
As someone who is starting off in the board game space but having past experience running a successful escape room I feel that some of my insight will be helpful to passing readers.
Thanks for reading! If you found this to be engaging please engage in the conversation by commenting or sharing this post. I'm always open to feedback, and am looking forward to continuing expanding on Blurbs from the Bloated Toad. -Calvin