Mark down April 11th as an historic date in your… history book! It was the date of the first dekompile, the first stand-alone puzzlehunt created by me and Emanuel.
The event has been in the planning phase for a long time and along the way there have been many changes and updates. The game was originally planned as a larger, more fun, harder and overall more challenging version of The DreamHack Game which I’ve hosted for many years (some of them together with Emanuel).
It was planned as a 2-day puzzlehunt, more in the style of The Game, and covering a large area of Gothenburg. We intended all tasks be shorter, around 2 hours a task, than The DreamHack Game but overall more difficult. We thought the shorter tasks would lead to a more coherent experience with less “sitting still and just looking at the screen”-time, and perhaps would ease the making of a real storyline behind the entire game.
Unfortunately, we were not able to get enough people together for the event to afford to host it. We only marketed the game through our own contacts and previous players of The DreamHack Game and our British version The i-Hunt; obviously that wasn’t really enough.
To make something happen anyway we ended up making the game into a 10-12 hour competition with 4 teams on the starting-line. We kept the tasks aimed at betweeen 30 minutes and 2 hours, unfortunately we didn’t really have the resources to create that many location-based tasks. I think we created a pretty well-rounded game though and the players did seem to enjoy it. I think they got a lot of value for the 100 SEK ticket price.
Two tasks shined especially much I think. The reason is probably because those were the only tasks that me and Emanuel worked on together, that usually produces better results. One task we started planning about 9 months ago and started creating 6 months ago, the other one we came up with on the spot.
Foul play
The graphic you see here on the left side was created by Emanuel and acted as the rabbit hole for the task. It’s a fake news-article announcing the death of a missing woman, also insinuating some mysterious cause of her death. It points vaguely toward “popular online micro-publishing service”, I.E. twitter. If you searched for Tracy Robbins on twitter, you would find her, leading to her company website where you had to play hacker/investigator and find some hidden information.
The whole task was very nicely done in my opinion, with a pretty long and realistic twitter feed spanning a month or so and a real company website, full of fake information.
The Race for the finish line
This task was not so much about graphics or figuring stuff out that much. It was about the race. It was supposed to be a pretty fast and hectic race without much stopping. First of all, they got instructions that they had to SMS keywords to 72223 (which went to our application), when they sent in he right keyword, they would get something back.
They got some pictures of various places, named in order (1.jpg and so forth). In the first was a picture full of noise that they just had to open up in Photoshop and play around with the levels to uncover a URL. This led them to the first place they were supposed to visit. At that spot we had written dekompile on a small note that was already there (tricking them not to look there). When they saw the note though (which most teams did pretty fast) they SMS’ed in what was on that note and they got instructions in the SMS on where to go next, and the race was on.
I liked this task because it involved a lot of steps, they weren’t all that useful or hard to figure out or anything, but in keeping it easy I hope we kept it as much of a race as possible. With the SMS’es we also let the players have confirmation all the way through that they were on the right track.
Some stats!
Emanuel created these pretty graphs to send out in our final e-mail to the players. They show how many wrong answers each team had and how much time they spent on each task. It gives a small view of how the game is played and what kind of progress you should expect in the game.
This first one shows the amount of minute spent on a task on the vertical axis and the task number on the horizontal axis. The second graph shows total amount of time played and number of wrong answers per team.
Team Progress
Wrong answers and total duration
What happens next?
I strongly disbelieve this will be the last dekompile, but we can’t hold the game in this format. Even if we were to market it more widely I doubt we would be able to get a big enough crowd that it would be “worth it”. It’s always fun to host the game, but it’s a lot of work and we have to make it work economically as well.
Since both me and Emanuel are going away for a year, we’ll have that time to gather new ideas and come up with the perfect format for the future game. There are a lot of ideas out there on how to change it to make it more publicly appealing without loosing the challenge, and that’s what we need to do. We’ll have a year to pick the best idea and to plan it accordingly. I think it can be awesome!
