Silly Obstacles in Myst V

Last night, we finished the first world in Myst V: End of Ages... and I'm disappointed. By the puzzle, sure (a random symbol drawn in the snow indicates steam?), but primarily by the obstacle the provides the excuse for the puzzle.

In this case, it's a frozen puddle. Apparently, it was too tough for us to walk over this solid mass, so we had to melt it enough to reveal a rocky substrata maze. Seriously?

We've run in poor blockades before, where it would have been far simpler just to climb over the obstacle than go through the thirty-seven steps to find the secret passageway. Even Myst V itself has these foot-high gates that you can't get past without unlocking them from the other side.

But I've never seen something as silly as this. It's a solid, flat patch of ground that prevents us from going on. Slippery, sure, and maybe the game makers figured we wouldn't want to risk a Bambi moment. There's really no reason anyone would consider it a legitmate obstacle.

Funding that Puzzle Addiction

Participating in puzzle hunts and Games isn't a cheap activity, even if saving 83 cents a day for the next six months will allow me to pay my share of the upcoming Game. Unfortunately, being a stay-at-home dad doesn't pay very well and being a single-career family in the Bay Area doesn't readily lend itself to disposable income.

So once again, I've been working on a new puzzle type (kind of in the same way that Battleship Sudoku is a new type of puzzle). The qualifying puzzle for Ghost Patrol was kind of similar but at the same time completely different. Regardless, it spurred me on yesterday to get the Javascript completed so that at least I have a working puzzle interface.

I sent out a link to some friends and family members so they could test it. One friend who gave it a try said he finally understood the puzzle (I had been sending out PDF versions for a few months) and that he enjoyed it. He then added, kinda jokingly, "So where is the timer? Where is the leaderboard?" Those are two things I want to add, along with a message board/forum. For now, though, I'm just concentrating on getting the Javascript to do what I want it to and the website to look at least halfway presentable.

I can hope that when it's ready, maybe it catches on a little and the money from advertising or other side benefits will keep me enjoying my addicition for quite some time.

Expected Rejection

A few months ago, I sent a puzzle away to the New York Times for consideration as a novelty puzzle. Today, I got a response:

Will asked me to say thanks for showing him your Boxed In puzzle. Unfortunately, it's not something he can use.

Now back to the normally scheduled reality :)

All Glory to the HypnoCube

Is there something wrong with me that the first thing I thought when I came across this is "How can I use that to make a puzzle?" Apart from the $400 price tag that is...

An Envelope for the NYT

Yesterday, I sent off one of my puzzles to the New York Times for consideration as a novelty puzzle. It's really a long shot and I don't have any big hopes... except for that tiny, tiny spark of hope that I keep hidden because I know it has no sense of reality.

Puzzle Tweening

I have a problem with every puzzle I create: Tweening. In animation, it refers to the animator who draws the images between the keyframes (or in Flash, the automated animation between them); in Puzzleland, I'm referring to the process between germination of a puzzle idea and the finished result.

A simple example would be a crossword that has a twist which is used for the single word solution. I can come up with the format (crossword), the twist (say, a standardized variogram/crushword), and the solution (first letters of variogrammed words join to form the solution). But when it comes all the stuff in between (coming up with the way the words cross), I get frustrated, bored, and/or don't have the time to commit to filling in all that information, and so the puzzle never gets completed.

I need a puzzle tweener.

Understanding the Point

On Saturday, I was travelling down to Berkeley and gazed out across the bay at San Francisco. As I saw one of the more obvious landmarks of the City, it suddenly hit me: I now understand why the Transamerica Pyramid and the Washington Monument were used in a visual depiction of GPS coordinates.

A Wedding Acrostic and a Postponed Hunt

I've decided to indefinitely postpone the puzzle hunt I was working on for friends and family. Although I have the puzzles, developing them solo takes too much time away from my daughter, my wife, my friends, and a hunt for a way to earn some side income. When we did it last year, it was just two of us, and that was hard enough. This year, I figured that starting on puzzle design early would make up for working on it alone. Wrong! Anyway...

I'm writing an acrostic puzzle and just sent the 4th draft to the bride-to-be for approval (it's something to keep the guests occupied at the reception). This is my first time designing one, so obviously it's not perfect. I ended up with some nasty letters at the end along with somewhat laughable clues for them. I wonder just how many people will figure out what an "aged placed to experiment on wet dirt" (three words, nine letters) is or will forgive the solution to "I'm no longer addicted to Doublemint; I'm ___ ___" (two words, six letters). The bride-to-be, however, thought they were funny, but, more importantly, was especially pleased with all the clues that I worked in about them and the wedding party.

Always looking for a way to use my love of creating and solving puzzles in a profitible means (the whole "do what you love, the money will follow" concept), I thought that maybe creating various custom puzzles for weddings would be a fun idea. The first thing I thought was to check out "weddingpuzzles.com". To my surprise, a website came up dedicated to the idea of selling puzzles (crosswords and word searches mainly) for wedding receptions and other wedding-related activities. Plus, the packages they were offering were below what I had considered charging and much classier to boot (engraved cardstock with ribbons, for example).

I'm still considering it, especially since the site, as well as all its sister sites, is no longer taking orders ("buy our software instead and do it yourself!")... but I can't see operating on much of a profit margin: Their cheapest package is 3 copies (one framed) for $30 and assuming that my time is worth $25/hour, that means $5 for materials and only one hour of work on the puzzle itself. I guess the difference is that the customer is required to supply their own words, while I distilled a ton of details about the bride, groom, and wedding party into a usable puzzle.

My problem with this as a form of employment is that I cannot stand repetitive tasks. And sadly, I know this would become one fairly quickly.

He really should have known

The following is as near a complete transcript of the conversation as my brain will allow.

Me: Hi Dad, mind if I use your radial arm saw?

Dad: As long as you don't take any fingers off. What do you need it for?

Me: I want to make scale replicas of these. [holds up strange objects]

Dad: Okay, you can do that. There's a little bit of a trick to it. It's easy, but it's time consuming.

Me: I think I prefer that to the other way around.

Dad: So what are you making these for?

Me: It's for a puzzle.

Dad: [laugh] I should have known.

Me: Yes, you should have!

Thwarted Again!

An announcement came out recently about an event in New York city that seems to directly take an idea we had should we host a BANG. So what does that mean? Should we throw the idea out the window completely? Should we keep it and have people thing, "Oh, you just copied that idea from X"?

Regardless, when the time comes we certainly have some evidence (wiki history) about when we came up with the idea... although it was about a month or more before I got around to writing it up in our wiki.

How to be unoriginal

In a world of over 6.6 billion people, it's hard to have an original idea. I thought I had steeled myself to this concept, yet it was still frustrating to find in the course of the Google Puzzle Hunt that the Burninators had had the same ideas I had had for four puzzles ("They stole that!" I exclaimed facetiously). One specifically I was planning on using as the meta for our own little puzzle hunt. After seeing it in action, however, I'm kinda turned off on using it... not because it's a bad idea or executed poorly, but I hate being the second person to use an idea, even if the idea was conceived separately and independently.

To be fair, one of the ideas was simply the packaging to use with the puzzle, and another I wrote simply as a sample puzzle, and was based off of an IQ challenge. The other two, though, I thought were original and I was kinda proud of them. Oh well.

Now I have to come up with a new meta...