This is a retro-post for the Mystery Hunt 2023,
for which I played a somewhat minor role on the organizing team (teammate).
You can play at interestingthings.museum.
Office décor.
There is an ongoing list of write-ups about the hunt being kept at
puzzles.wiki,
and you may also be interested in the
reddit AMA from teammate.
As a follow-up to the previous post,
I am recording here some details about the (numerous, varied, and deep)
revisions that a bunch of my puzzles went through during the production process.
These puzzles are in chronological order of when I wrote the puzzle.
Spoiler warning:
Unlike the last post, these will completely spoil all of the puzzles below.
Surprisingly, the gist of the puzzle mostly survived revisions:
the idea of an encoding-based puzzle with the
key step to look at seven-segment displays between the Braille and resistor color encoding.
One issue I ran into while constructing was that
ABCDEF6 is actually too big in base 16 to store in an eight-bit number,
which is part of why I ended up 1337-ing the seven-segment display bits.
The final presentation of the “A Bit of Light” puzzle;
it looked pretty much like this at the start …
The 2021 Mystery Hunt
concluded a while ago, and wow, what an experience.
I was lucky enough to be on the organizing team,
and I am so proud right now to be able to say I am a ✈️✈️✈️ Galactic Trensdetter ✈️✈️✈️.
(If you don’t know what a puzzle hunt is,
betaveros has a great introduction.)
I came in to the MIT Mystery Hunt with no writing experience at all,
and ended up being listed as the author of a few.
It was a trial by fire, to say the least.
In this post I want to say a bit about the parts
of the puzzle-writing process that surprised me the most,
in the hopes that maybe it would be helpful to future authors.
A nice introduction is given by e.g.
David Wilson,
which I read many times before I actually attempted to write my first puzzle.
Most of what …
