As the teammate Hunt page points out, making such a feature is painful because of two main reasons. Even later, answer call-ins became answer callbacks. The EiCs were the ones in charge of helping develop the ideas and getting the metas testsolved. This was an innovation that, I believe, was first done in Hackin’ the Beanstalk. Puzzlord shows these puzzles to the EiCs, who are technically spoiled on every puzzle. It was also then that I learned about the concept of freezing, which is a point in time after which development becomes more strict. I got to see Discords and Slacks and Zoom rooms, and, in one case, even gather.town. Here’s an early sketch when the name JUICE wasn’t chosen yet, and we called it buzz, in a nod to the 2020 hunt: The planning for what Last year, the Left Out decided to switch to automated answer checking, in which teams simply typed in the answer on the website and got instant confirmation of whether they were right or wrong. ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ is a team with a lot of Floor Pi alumni, and I’ve gotten to know a little bit about what the floor was like. Sometimes this is as simple as converting it into HTML, sometimes it involves some fancier formatting, and sometimes it involves making interactivity work. I will never get tired of that joke. Many, many, many NPCs. And all of the puzzle ideas I placed on Puzzlord were “I want to write a puzzle about X”. Our meta writing process consisted of a bunch of brainstorming sessions to get an overall sense of what the hunt would look like. The one I don't mention here is the Filipino Students Association, which I'm the president of. We didn’t solve the whole hunt during each BTS. Even as early as May, we already had the idea of having short interactions after each meta solve, where the team would put into action the answer for their meta. The same sheet also listed shifts for the various on-call roles we had during the hunt, like the Zoom Czar, the Email Manager, the Actor Wrangler, the Interaction Scheduling Manager, the Hint Monitor, the Email Monitor, and the Phone Czar. The overall structure is thus kinda sorta shallow? Some of these last rehearsals were public, and it amazed me how the cast ran through the scenes in such a natural, There was supposed to be an intro runaround to assemble the “dimensional device”, then a mid-hunt runaround to power the portal that sends Professor Fusion through. We would all hang out in a voice channel and, well, write puzzles together. Selecting the theme brought its own set of deadlines to the table. Contributing to the next the Galactic Puzzle Hunt, whenever that’ll be. First, I think the committee did a really good job. Spoilers for the Infinite Corridor and ⊥IW.nano metas, and the puzzles Nutraumatic, For Your Eyes Only, Escape From Life, Befuddled, Filler Puzzle, Blind Calculation, Homemade Photography, How to Run a Puzzlehunt, Successively More Abundant in Verbiage, Enclosures, In C, Analog Circuitry, Bingo, At A Loss For Words, You Learn Something New Every Day, Catch and Release, and World Fisherman. I learned enough C# to hack together some small quality-of-life things, like the size messages in ⊥IW.nano. ended up being something that, in my opinion, was pretty elegant. A commit is kind of like an update made to the code. There was the main cast, and each of the main characters had their own understudies. By the way, if you think my front-end work looks good, I’m looking for an internship this summer…. One of the games we played in the MMO was MMO Hide and Seek, which is pretty much what it sounds like, and it was a game that a lot of Galactic members liked. I wouldn't know. I knew crunch time was a thing, but wow that was a lot of work in a short time. The smobster’s fame spread, capturing the heart of every single member of the puzzle community. Like gph-site, Silenda is also a Django app, and the little I understand of Django I’ve learned from working on the ESP website. It was eventually moved to 26-100, because we realized that not all teams would've unlocked Kresge by the time the event happened. they happen because people make them happen. ... Nerf Night at Adrenaline Athletics. The Tunnels area was also implemented around this time. These objects would make some new area in the MMO available. If you waited for 180 seconds in the registration website, you’d see the little snippy boi floating in space. You asked for it, we got it… TNVC is proud to announce the release of the L3Harris Ground Panoramic Night Vision Goggle (GPNVG) available for commercial sales EXCLUSIVELY through TNVC.. TNVC is a full distributor for ALL products within the L3Harris Integrated Vision Solutions portfolio, offering finished goods direct from L3Harris. For example, during the runaround, Professor Hemlock’s connection would be unstable because of the anomalies in the other universe. No, this was a different feeling. Basically, you could press E to have this emote show up over your head. This is a pun on the Pokémon Guzzlord, which says a lot about our sensibilities. Sorry, not sorry. Discord is also excellent for having great search features and having an archive of all the messages, which was an incredibly useful reference for writing this post. Les infos, chiffres, immobilier, hotels & le Mag https://www.communes.com Of course, puzzlehunts aren’t just about the puzzles. The art and MMO teams had a document outlining the amount of work they had to do left, as part of the decision, and they estimated that they could only get around I’m glad that this eventually changed to the better UI of an actual grid of buttons. The first one references, Dan Katz notes in a comment to his blog post that Setec, For some reason, we internally called this, Silenda here is the hunt website server; I, The notes in the solution claims it is the last puzzle, but only because, Steven says they chose the name because it is Latin for, There are many subtle layers to this image. being to host the hunt online and to postpone the hunt, hopefully to run it in-person in 2022. Second, a cube of paper with FREE YANNICK, referencing his puzzle. I made a post about last year’s Hunt, which also has an explanation of what a puzzlehunt is, so you can look at that. ISIS puzzles.⁠12 The first bit of load testing also happened in November; there’s some detail about it in this Reddit comment. The two biggest responses were to give a satisfying experience for all teams, not just top ones, and to Ask the editors, not me? And I’ll admit that I’m so, so happy to get all this praise from people I don’t know, even people I admire, for these things. One of the best things about Mystery Hunt this year was how this little snippy boi captured everyone’s heart: “First colonized the Charles by hitching a ride with intergalactic space traders.” from link. Left Out had their own lockout algorithm. It was amazing to see how our hunt made people feel, which really, is one of the things I value the most about our hunt; I’ll talk about this more later. Then there were the meetings. Robin was originally Dr. Robin Octree rather than Robin Vogel. I’m not sure how it changed to be the ghost puzzle it is now, but I think this happened in November. Our Nerf night is generally for ages 5 (five) and up. Before then, we mostly called it “altMIT”. But here are some things that didn’t quite make it to the authors’ notes: Spoilers for the puzzles Unmasked, ★, An American in Paris, Dolphin, Squee Squee, Questionable Answers, and the Clusters meta. I’m not sure if these quite happened, but things were definitely frozen the week leading up to hunt or so, where every single commit to the MMO was scrutinized. For Mystery Hunt, the fact that they’re called answer call-ins tells about their history. Then the copy-editors send it to “Needs Hints”. Here’s one thing that might be surprising. We had the very visible airplane emoji next to our display names and were clearly identifiable as the running team, so we didn’t go to a certain area on the Projection Device unless at least twenty teams had access to it. Now, I think I can say that my connection with Galactic isn’t just that I lived on Floor Pi and Galactic grew from Floor Pi, or even that I’ve hunted with them and written a hunt with them. continuing in the tradition of our servers having cool names. For example, last year’s hunt had wedding invitations sent out during registration, and it was actually a hunt about a theme park. Yes, it’s a huge undertaking, but if I put my mind to it and work with people and take my time, it can happen. GPH has found that having canned hints, or pre-written hints that hint-givers could edit, helped save time answering hints. Are you ready for a night of nerf wars? There’s a FAQ in the Tempest README that explains why the name was chosen: The wrap-up already has some cool concept art, most of which was collected and drawn in March while the style was being decided. Boring numbers incoming. Personally, I think the final runaround puzzle ended up being a great end of the hunt, even if the final step of finding the coin was a bit anticlimactic. The process that puzzles get written involves several steps, organized through this helpful app The original proposal also called for the hunt midpoint to happen after fixing certain rounds, but this was eventually changed to just be a timed event. This interaction would be very different if people were on-campus, rather than in their homes. Through November more scripts were started. Testsolving is different from regular puzzlehunt solving in that the groups are relatively fixed, and the time limits are more relaxed, with some testsolves staying open for several days. And even then, there’s also the question of which goals are more important than others. A team due for an interaction showed up in the interaction queue. Emotes! The smobster was released to the world at large, and everyone in the entire galaxy instantly gained the desire to protect and care for the smobster. The numbers that had to be controlled, then, were the puzzles unlocked at certain amounts of JUICE. The first time, in November, was in the Tunnels, back when it wasn’t even tiled yet. note the manual section marker and placement of page buttons, wires are now labeled with 1 to 5, batteries look better, the lights feel "glowier" idk what actually changed, maybe it's just the cube module, note that this was copy and pasted four times, once for each level, each with different numbers, (x, y, z) is transposed, so we make it (y, x, z), the plane was from our testsolve, i think, people waiting outside 26-100 for archery, crowds of people in the athletics area for the final runaround, wrap-up picture on the dot. Are YOU Ready to Play? In that sense they were kinda like ESP meetings. Now, I’m not remotely knowledgeable on servers or systems, so everything I’ll report is based on my shoddy understanding of them. People in the team may have done it for different reasons, but I want to believe that many of us did it to give back to the puzzle community, to create something we’d be proud of, to make a piece of art that will be remembered and talked about in the years to come. People got passionate about the theme proposal process. Teams would then go to a room and open a physical lockbox with this key, to get one component of the “final object” they need to finish the hunt. The term “fish puzzle” here refers to the 2015 School of Fish round, a round of 56 puzzles, each meant to be about a third of the difficulty of other puzzles. Sometimes there are puzzles that solve to an instruction, like last year’s, Post-meta interactions. We named our pig “Yannick”, after Yannick, who was one of the people in the testsolving group. Loosely, the z-level is a number that controls the order in which it’s drawn: smaller z-values are drawn behind larger z-values. On the other hand, our theme was slightly more constrained: the metas had to be themed around MIT buildings and locations. Original phrasing being TRENDSET the Mystery Hunt. An Athena locker is a folder in the Athena filesystem, which is where the Puzzle Club stores most of its data. This was also compounded by the fact that the Basketball puzzles were all time-released, which meant that pretty much all the teams were working on them at the same time. The meta writing process began in March, after the MMO theme was selected. of our puzzles were written during FPF, including the Yew Labs puzzle Unmasked, which I “co-authored”. Here’s an early sketch of the Athletics area and the Student Center. Around May or so, there was this story roadmap spreadsheet showing the possible directions the story could go. The thing about big events like Mystery Hunt or Splash is that I crash after them. At the time of writing, you can view the virtual pig by looking at the solution. There was an afternoon in early December where we had what Justine dubbed the Extravagant Events Exposition, where the event runners just ran every event for us in an afternoon. I’m not sure if DD, who designed the shirt, intended it, but it’s pretty neat. The rationale for the midpoint was so that we could have a character from ⊥IW who wasn’t an explicit antagonist, and the rationale for the endgame was to have a “fake-out endgame plot” of swapping the professors, when it’s actually looking for the coin. There’s even the final, huge group picture on the Dot we took after wrap-up. We had several simulations to predict when each round would get unlocked and solved by certain teams. The editors then review the puzzle, and then send it to either “Idea in Development”, to mark it for further development before getting giving the go signal to write the puzzle, or they Working with Palindrome as the Puzzle Club to make Mystery Hunt 2022, and then participating in it. Teams would use the website to put their phone number in the queue, and then HQ would call them and ask them to spell the answer, letter by letter. Steven, our web lead, basically wrote the entire webserver with spoilr as a base and called it We spent an afternoon a few days later designing the specification. The purpose of the BD is to direct the flow of hunt design, and have the final say in the decision process, hence the “dictator” part. Eh. The name Barbara S. Yew was in the original proposal. Which, wasn't a serious idea, right? Most of the weekend was a blur, but I do remember a handful of interactions. PowerA creates the most innovative accessories for the world’s best interactive entertainment, focused on performance, quality, and enhancing the consumer experience off-book⁠20 For this scavenger hunt, teams were supposed to take pictures of things like Kresge Auditorium or the Great Dome. The Infinite Corridor PMI is very fun, because either I’m taking the role of a clueless Yew Labs member paging through a poorly sorted directory, or a contractor telling people to say the word whom’st’ve. They’re used to get a lot of puzzles written or testsolved, and are also a good way to socialize with other people in the team. After all, the number of people who'll ever see any given puzzle is probably less than the number of views the front page of MIT Admissions gets in a week. Kat Read our. Again, the whole group contributes to decision-making, but the final say rests with relatively fewer people. We didn’t want final puzzles to be difficult or aha-based. We were trying to figure out a way to make a preview image without spoiling the puzzle. Most of my work was on the registration side of things, which included There are many subtle layers to this image. Some commentary from me: more than can fit on the actual dot, probably. I remember a tile style guide that specified the scale: “1 unit in the MMO is 1 meter IRL… most doorways will be 2 units wide, wide hallways will be 3 units, narrow passages will be 1 unit”. One of the things we touched on in the kickoff meeting was the overarching timeline to get the hunt written. I’ve spent a lot of time these past few months isolating myself physically, and socializing with the people in Galactic has been a huge factor in getting me through the year. If I were writing about the things I learned making this hunt, maybe I should talk about what I learned while contributing to the MMO. I loved walking in the MMO and doing the emote, and then have people emote back! Here’s a graph of (approximately) the number of puzzles I’ve solved over time, for the past year: by the time i graduate i would have solved every mystery hunt. I felt myself getting better at puzzles, not because I needed to, or because I was told to, or even because I actively wanted it. Experimental Evidence is the traditional scavenger hunt, as the puzzle page explains, which is an annual Mystery Hunt puzzle. The other pig should be three-dimensional, but it doesn’t have to be alive.” So, you know, Exact Words, and we tried to take a picture of Yannick with Yannick. Then, Here’s are some screenshots relating to the Free Yannick movement. Not particularly original by any stretch. We took no small risk, and we very much could have failed ourselves. On the last day of FPF, which we called Small Fry Day, there was also a huge testsolving session where we testsolved all the FPF puzzles. I was on the fence myself, but leaning towards postponing the hunt. Dan Katz notes in a comment to his blog post that Setec calls this girth. Add grattan@email.grattan.co.uk to your address book so you don't miss out on any of our emails, Check your inbox for your welcome email (including junk folder). The art, story, and MMO subgroups had meetings to talk about what would happen in both options. As discussed earlier, September was when the Athletics round was decided to be included in the hunt. The hunt website has a recap of the entire story, and the wrap-up also has lots of interesting comments, so I won’t talk too much about the story here. Interacting with teams is really fun, and gave me a lot of joy during the hunt weekend. Except I tore out the jQuery, because I am vehemently opposed to jQuery.