A Mysterious Puzzlehunt Retrospective

[Moonrise]

 

What is this and why is it here?

This is a retrospective on helping run the 2023 MIT Mystery Hunt from a member of this year’s organizing team, teammate. It is in these forums because in a way, my personal puzzle journey was catalyzed here (I won’t go into that story here though). 

I don’t expect this sort of post to be a frequent occurrence, if ever again, so please forgive me your confusion if you stumbled in by chance. It’s mostly intended for folks on these forums who already know me and/or about puzzlehunts, and for me to send this link to friends who’ve been wondering why I disappeared for a year... But considering where I am posting this I’ll begin with an intro.

Some context:  What is a puzzlehunt? What is the Mystery Hunt?

A puzzlehunt is a collection of puzzles often connected by an overarching story. Solve some puzzles, unlock more puzzles, save the day. In a puzzle you receive some information and have to extract an answer out of it, which is almost always an English word or phrase. Puzzles come in many different forms and on any topic imaginable. The only commonality is a lack of instructions on how to solve it, that’s up to you to find out. Here is a more exhaustive description.

The annual Mystery Hunt is the largest puzzle hunt of its kind. MITMH runs annually during MLK weekend, this year in person for the first time since 2020. The first team to find the “coin” hidden at the end of the hunt wins. By tradition the previous year's winning team writes the next MH. It is an honor, and a responsibility. A promise, and an opportunity. 

I describe it to my bemused non-puzzle friends and colleagues as organizing a (free-to-attend) research conference. Except instead of inviting speakers you make all 160 presentations yourself, including performing the disparate research for each and often with minimal experience in the topics. Among other things. In one year.

The mystery hunt is a culmination of the organizing team’s endless volunteer time, love, and creativity into this crazy hobby that brings us together. This year was no different. 

On to the hunt itself and the writing process:

Disclaimer: These comments center around my own interests and contributions in the hunt. I am only one person in a team of more than 60 so there was a lot more happening behind the scenes.

Another disclaimer: Spoilers ahead.

Final note: Original websites were on interestingthings.museum and puzzlefactory.place. They are now archived here.

Usually Hunt lasts for just a weekend. You have fun solving some puzzles with friends, then move on with life. 

When teammate won MH22, to me it felt like that hunt never ended. We finished on Sunday 16 Jan 2022. On Monday our leaders met with the departing team’s exec for the hand off. On Wednesday I joined our Discord writing server. We had the theme of MH23 chosen by the end of that month and the writing process was continuous since then. By the end of 2022 I couldn't make small talk without something puzzley entering the conversation. We ran our hunt in Jan 2023. So only now as far as I am concerned is MH22 finally over. 

The theme this year opened up as a museum with puzzling exhibits written by an AI: MATE (Act 1). It quickly became evident that something was wrong and teams “illicitly” gained access to the Puzzle Factory operated by MATE (Act 2). MATE was overworked by teammate and needed your help along with the help of four rejected AIs to fix the factory and fix Mystery Hunt (Act 3). 

However the original theme proposal left room for interpretation and flexibility, probably too much. Discussions about hunt structure and story worldbuilding lasted for months afterwards. I didn’t feel well versed enough in MH traditions or storytelling to offer useful insights so I mostly stayed out of these. I do love a good story (don't we all on these forums...) but writing is a different matter. I did lurk hard in the story and hunt structure channels and used it as inspo for some concept art. (See if you can id the connections between these and the final product!) This period of development was incredibly important, though it perhaps delayed puzzle writing. I’ve read from previous years’ writing teams that requiring too much from theme proposals pre-selection led to an “arms race” of ideas that caused tension and significant wasted effort. I assume our rush to select a theme was an attempt to avoid that. It caused its own problems so maybe there is a sweet spot. 

Puzzle writing began with the Act 2 metas in March. Act 1 metapuzzle writing was opened in April. Act 3 metapuzzle brainstorming started sometime concurrently but writing lasted well beyond the other two. I was involved in one of each of these. I remember finalizing the Act 1 metapuzzle during a layover in London at the end of May, memorable mostly because I realized my charge adapter was in my checked bag (I would think I learned the first time, but this happened twice during hunt writing). 

By this point I was itching to move full time to writing feeder puzzles, but metapuzzles are priority so that was my focus. The Act 2 metapuzzle I was involved in finished its final testsolve mid-June. 

Puzzles I worked on:

Going in I was hesitant about the number of puzzles I could contribute to. I am not a prolific author. My decent ideas are few and far in between. Good puzzles tend to come from in sync collaborations and I wasn’t hopeful for many of those since I was 6-9 timezones away from most teammates. In our writing interest form I believe I answered “5(?)” on the “how many puzzles can you contribute to” question. 

To my surprise I underestimated it a bit  I am happy with most of the core ideas here, though in hindsight I would definitely change things. Ah well, that's how we learn. The writing process of each of these puzzles has a story behind it. I have notes about each but won’t include those here for the sake of brevity unless someone really wants to know. But tl;dw (too long; didn’t write): it was an adventure... 

Here is the list of puzzles and the round they appear in.

Bridge Building (Science)
Formula Deluxe (Natural History)
A Conspiracy Network (World History meta)
The Junk Pile (Basement meta)
Alloy of Words (Office)
Sliced Up (Factory Floor)
Error: File "txtadv.py" not found (Wyrm)
Endless Knots (Wyrm)

I am also credited on The Devil's in the Details (Wyrm), Period of Wyrm (Wyrm metameta), The Scheme (Wyrm meta), and Reactivation (Act 2 capstone meta) though my role in these ranged minor to “I think they forgot to remove me”. 

I am credited as the artist in Tissues (Factory Floor) and The Blueprint (Factory Floor meta). The latter of these took up 70% of my time in the months before Hunt which I'll talk about in the next section.

I didn’t testsolve many puzzles (mostly due to timezones again) but individual ones I enjoyed were Kubernetes, Think Fast, and (snake emoji) . Also Dispel the Bees is a great one and I am particularly fond of Cute Cats (yes, my cats made it on there). 

Art contributed:

Puzzles are the beating heart of any puzzlehunt. But teammate is also a very tech, story, and art happy team. We have trouble saying “no” in the face of crazy visions. Additionally, MH is a place to set a spectacle. This led to serious scope creep across the board (i.e. “hey let’s make a point and click game with animations and parallax, that sounds cool!”). 

I wanted to contribute a bit, so I joined the art team. I’m fairly new to digital art but I always wanted to give it a try in a larger scope… well, be careful what you wish for. 

I ended up on the Factory art team (there were also Museum and AI teams). Our work included everything in Act 2.

The process was a huge challenge.

— Factory Architecture: 

A large part of the hunt theme was the "puzzle factory," the place where puzzles are made. A graphical story presentation meant that we had to design one to our requirements. This meant I suddenly had to become an architect.

We wanted the factory building architecture to be somewhat believable (#iamnotanarchitectbutohwell). The design had to accommodate the factory rounds, unlock ordering(!), and meta constraints(!!, looking at you Blueprint ). There also had to be a monitor bank somewhere to tie all the hunt rounds together. I remember conversations about whether the factory is one or multiple buildings, where the front door should be (what do solvers see first after entering the factory?), which direction do floors unlock, how do areas connect inside, etc. I also wanted to stay realistic to my art abilities and the perceived time commitment compared to puzzles (haha).

Oddly enough, putting all this together was like solving a wacked logic puzzle. It was fun! It also took a lot of time. 

— Tech: 

We scope-crept our way into making the factory as immersive as possible. This translated to point and click game UI (i.e. puzzles are objects you find in rooms (small thing, but I am proud of suggesting custom mouse cursors (did I just use multiple parenthesis? oh yes))), machinery animations, wide scrolling scenes for a sense of exploration, and a parallaxing background for depth. We took heavy inspiration for these elements from Machinarium. I also ended up playing several games of Deponia, nominally for inspiration but mostly as a break from hunt work. 

I was not on the tech team and can't imagine how crazy this all was to implement. I can't emphasize enough that all the tech folks are real wizards to make this happen, nothing would be possible without them <3 

— Art Style: 

Canonically the factory represents “the real world” whereas all non-factory rounds are “normal puzzlehunt pages.” Therefore we wanted the art style in stark contrast with Museum and AI rounds, but also important we did not want to not distract from them. The Portal games provided heavy inspiration for the mood. 

I did some art style tests and more concept art, but In the end the art style was partly determined on what could be comfortably produced in large quantities. That ended up being the correct direction as we got closer to the deadline and the work increased. I chose to use a lot of hard edges, occasional outlines, soft shading, and some minor textures. 

—

In summary, my art contributions were the monitor bank/factory floor, office, front door, and the factory building scenes. The animations and basement scene were done by amazing teammates Jacqui and Tracy respectively <3 We had guest contributions of various assets all around too <3 And I really really suggest to browse around the rest of the hunt website(s) too! 

Some fun facts:

• What would eventually become the final factory building, and thus dictate the internal layout logic, was ideated in a physical sketchbook during some particularly boring conference sessions late August. Sometimes my own priorities in life scare me.
• Between the factory floor, basement, and office rounds I estimate around 500 individual assets, possibly more.
• There are 9 cats roaming the factory. 8 are cameos, 7 are clickable so you can learn their names. I meant to add more but ran out of time. 
• The best brush I found for drawing the stainless steel texture I wanted coincidentally turned out to be a “cat hair brush”. So, you could say the entire factory is covered in cat hair. Hope you’re not allergic.
• I ended up drawing random assets right up until the night before hunt (that tiling default gear background for example… and before you yell at me for procrastinating, trust me other stuff was a higher priority).
• The first asset that was ever drawn for the factory... is the cat in the office with a swinging tail. I drew it as a joke, but then realized I could actually include it.

Overall I am very happy we managed to pull off the final result. Frankly I was not 100% qualified for this, but I loved the process of learning for it and I like to think I improved by the end. Journey before destination, right? But now, I am tired of drawing stainless steel and look forward to trying something else. The Ascent round is one amazing inspiration  

Hunt weekend:

I will not address the elephant in the room regarding hunt difficulty. (The elephant is getting self conscious and other blog posts cover it enough. I support the difficult decisions taken by our exec team and thank them wholeheartedly for their leadership <3)

This post is a bit longer than I thought so here I will be brief.

Running Hunt was wild. It was one of the craziest things I’ve done (and I like doing fun things like skiing on an active volcano with a plume of smoke rising behind me). It was also my first time at the event in person.  

The week leading up to hunt was a blur, the weekend more so. I spent it answering hints, carrying stuff, running events, visiting teams, running Think Fast and midpoint (playing the villain is fun!) interactions, building columns for kickoff, painting plywood gears late into the night for the final interaction, and not sleeping much. By wrap up we were very very sleep deprived. When I started puzzlehunting a few years back I never imagined it would lead here. But I knew that if the unlikely chance comes to contribute to Mystery Hunt, I would accept it.

But by far, the best part of Hunt was meeting the people along the way. Both on teammate, and some others... Thank you all, it meant the world to me. 
 

(Edit 9 May 2023: Updated links to the archive website and fixed minor wording things)

 

Edited May 9, 2023 by Moonrise

[AquaRegia he/him]

Thank you so much for writing this, it was very illuminating and entertaining!  Thanks also for including a Cosmere-themed puzzle this year.

P.S. Your art is wonderful; thanks for sharing.