![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Hunt writeup
So, Hunt is over.
I've been on a constructing team once before, Palindrome's Mystery Mystery Hunt in '08. I was sixteen when we started writing that Hunt, and I'd never constructed anything at all, so I was hesitant to put forward ideas. I ended up writing one puzzle myself, helping write another one, and answering phones all weekend, and that was pretty much all I did.
I wasn't one of the heavy lifters on this Hunt, but I can honestly say that I think it was better than it would have been without me. My contributions:
-The opening ceremony. I didn't write the script, but I organized most of it, made the signs, and came up with the .mp3 idea. (More on that below.)
-The talent show. Mike suggested the mechanism, but the concept and execution was me. Apologies, by the way, for the snafu with the music. I still have no idea what happened to those e-mails. But I think everyone got the music they needed somehow in the end.
-A Potential Problem. /dev/joe did the graphics; otherwise, all me. This was an easy puzzle, much easier than I originally wanted it to be. I had more complex plans for the image and was considering using temporal summation at one point. But in the end I'm okay with having a few easy puzzles in the Hunt; we were about due for a Hunt that ended before Sunday evening.
-Dr. Ox's Experiment. Liz wanted to do something with Dr. Horrible, so I thought up the idea of video blog posts. Mike suggested using Peter's Evil Overlord List and helped me brainstorm a few of the ideas for shenanigans. I wrote the scripts, and Wes did a beautiful job of performing them.
-Frritt-Flacc. Liz wrote two of the shorter scripts, but I did most of the work on this. I'm really proud of the House/Holmes idea, and I think it worked well in the end--several people told me that it was fun to solve rather than the slog required for many of these research-heavy puzzles, and I got three compliments on specific bits of the scripts.
-The 2005 supplementary information. I also created the logo that appears with it. For this and the other SIs I wrote, Mike (or others) thought up the mechanism and I did the writing constrained by the period letters.
-The 1983 supplementary information.
-The 1786 supplementary information.
-I did not write the 1773 supplementary information, but I did spend a lot of time researching Ben Franklin and figuring out how to make it work, and I proposed the idea of using Franklin's thirteen virtues.
-The 2010 runaround, which is not up on the website yet. Liz and I wrote this together; I had the ideas for the SAM 30/300 trick and the Holy Grail questions at the end.
I also functioned as more than just a warm body during the running of the Hunt. I wasn't one of the main organizers, but I had a decent general knowledge of how the Hunt worked and where questions should be directed, and I didn't really realize until the end of the weekend how busy I'd been the whole time. I snatched two three-hour naps between Thursday morning and Sunday morning, and paninis were fed to me periodically by Liz, but otherwise my time was dedicated to helping run the event. And man, do I feel more satisfied than I did after the '08 Hunt.
I'd like to hear more about what people thought of the new way of doing the opening ceremony. So far, the consensus seems to be "not perfect, but better than echoey amplification no one can hear, and it's good that something got done." Which is pretty much what I hoped to hear. My goal with that was mainly to get future constructing teams thinking about how to handle it--Hunt people are smart, and I'm sure someone will think of an idea that works better than mine. I've already heard a few people talking about moving the opening ceremony somewhere else, which honestly might be the best plan.
Something that I was warned about ahead of time (by no fewer than three separate past constructors) was team visits. Apparently what often happens is that constructing team members visit only the people they know, and other teams have gotten angry about this. So I tried to make sure that every team got visits, despite the very small number of people we had at HQ (eighteen total, maybe?). Wes and Liz visited every team near the beginning, and I went around to see a whole bunch of teams on Saturday. It was really fun, and I even got to watch Left as an Exercise for the Reader solve Banner Headline, which they'd been working on for a long time. They also had a dude dressed as Frank, the rabbit from Donnie Darko, for their sweded film.
Speaking of the sweded films: when it was about an hour and a half before the film festival and the team who was doing Fight Club hadn't submitted their video, Liz and I decided to swede it ourselves. They did actually submit it in time, so we didn't end up filming ours, but I decided to finish writing it anyway and we performed it at the film festival just for kicks. It was more of a parody than a swede, about the Mystery Hunt, and it went over well. We might film it and put it up on the Hunt YouTube account if we have a chance. By the way, we definitely should have picked one sweded version of each film, rather than playing them all; apologies to those of you who had to sit through that event.
Most people seem to agree that overall, this was an awesome Hunt. While a lot of that was due to sheer blind luck, and I think it's important that we remember that and keep from making the same mistakes if we put on another Hunt in the future, it's also true that as a team we rock pretty hard. I'm incredibly glad I managed to get in on this at the beginning. It sounds like we'll probably stay together and solve next year--I think Second Chance is my favorite of the possible names that have been suggested so far. I'm looking forward to seeing what Metaphysical Plant has in store for us next year.
I've been on a constructing team once before, Palindrome's Mystery Mystery Hunt in '08. I was sixteen when we started writing that Hunt, and I'd never constructed anything at all, so I was hesitant to put forward ideas. I ended up writing one puzzle myself, helping write another one, and answering phones all weekend, and that was pretty much all I did.
I wasn't one of the heavy lifters on this Hunt, but I can honestly say that I think it was better than it would have been without me. My contributions:
-The opening ceremony. I didn't write the script, but I organized most of it, made the signs, and came up with the .mp3 idea. (More on that below.)
-The talent show. Mike suggested the mechanism, but the concept and execution was me. Apologies, by the way, for the snafu with the music. I still have no idea what happened to those e-mails. But I think everyone got the music they needed somehow in the end.
-A Potential Problem. /dev/joe did the graphics; otherwise, all me. This was an easy puzzle, much easier than I originally wanted it to be. I had more complex plans for the image and was considering using temporal summation at one point. But in the end I'm okay with having a few easy puzzles in the Hunt; we were about due for a Hunt that ended before Sunday evening.
-Dr. Ox's Experiment. Liz wanted to do something with Dr. Horrible, so I thought up the idea of video blog posts. Mike suggested using Peter's Evil Overlord List and helped me brainstorm a few of the ideas for shenanigans. I wrote the scripts, and Wes did a beautiful job of performing them.
-Frritt-Flacc. Liz wrote two of the shorter scripts, but I did most of the work on this. I'm really proud of the House/Holmes idea, and I think it worked well in the end--several people told me that it was fun to solve rather than the slog required for many of these research-heavy puzzles, and I got three compliments on specific bits of the scripts.
-The 2005 supplementary information. I also created the logo that appears with it. For this and the other SIs I wrote, Mike (or others) thought up the mechanism and I did the writing constrained by the period letters.
-The 1983 supplementary information.
-The 1786 supplementary information.
-I did not write the 1773 supplementary information, but I did spend a lot of time researching Ben Franklin and figuring out how to make it work, and I proposed the idea of using Franklin's thirteen virtues.
-The 2010 runaround, which is not up on the website yet. Liz and I wrote this together; I had the ideas for the SAM 30/300 trick and the Holy Grail questions at the end.
I also functioned as more than just a warm body during the running of the Hunt. I wasn't one of the main organizers, but I had a decent general knowledge of how the Hunt worked and where questions should be directed, and I didn't really realize until the end of the weekend how busy I'd been the whole time. I snatched two three-hour naps between Thursday morning and Sunday morning, and paninis were fed to me periodically by Liz, but otherwise my time was dedicated to helping run the event. And man, do I feel more satisfied than I did after the '08 Hunt.
I'd like to hear more about what people thought of the new way of doing the opening ceremony. So far, the consensus seems to be "not perfect, but better than echoey amplification no one can hear, and it's good that something got done." Which is pretty much what I hoped to hear. My goal with that was mainly to get future constructing teams thinking about how to handle it--Hunt people are smart, and I'm sure someone will think of an idea that works better than mine. I've already heard a few people talking about moving the opening ceremony somewhere else, which honestly might be the best plan.
Something that I was warned about ahead of time (by no fewer than three separate past constructors) was team visits. Apparently what often happens is that constructing team members visit only the people they know, and other teams have gotten angry about this. So I tried to make sure that every team got visits, despite the very small number of people we had at HQ (eighteen total, maybe?). Wes and Liz visited every team near the beginning, and I went around to see a whole bunch of teams on Saturday. It was really fun, and I even got to watch Left as an Exercise for the Reader solve Banner Headline, which they'd been working on for a long time. They also had a dude dressed as Frank, the rabbit from Donnie Darko, for their sweded film.
Speaking of the sweded films: when it was about an hour and a half before the film festival and the team who was doing Fight Club hadn't submitted their video, Liz and I decided to swede it ourselves. They did actually submit it in time, so we didn't end up filming ours, but I decided to finish writing it anyway and we performed it at the film festival just for kicks. It was more of a parody than a swede, about the Mystery Hunt, and it went over well. We might film it and put it up on the Hunt YouTube account if we have a chance. By the way, we definitely should have picked one sweded version of each film, rather than playing them all; apologies to those of you who had to sit through that event.
Most people seem to agree that overall, this was an awesome Hunt. While a lot of that was due to sheer blind luck, and I think it's important that we remember that and keep from making the same mistakes if we put on another Hunt in the future, it's also true that as a team we rock pretty hard. I'm incredibly glad I managed to get in on this at the beginning. It sounds like we'll probably stay together and solve next year--I think Second Chance is my favorite of the possible names that have been suggested so far. I'm looking forward to seeing what Metaphysical Plant has in store for us next year.