Enigmarch Week 2

 Just like I did last week, I've written a little bit about the puzzles I designed during the second week of  #Enigmarch.

This post will, by its nature, almost certainly contain spoilers for the puzzles mentioned. If you'd like to try solving them first, they can all be found here.

Day 8
Prompt - sharp

I've written a few music puzzles before - they always remind me of the many music theory classes I sat through at school, although thankfully technology makes it a lot easier to write scores these days! I use the free version  Noteflight, which seems to have all of the functionality I need. The biggest challenge is to find something to do other than simply 'here are some notes, now read them', and of course when doing that, only having the letters A-G to work with is somewhat limiting.  So I was quite pleased with the work around I found here; although I felt it needed something to hint towards the fact that more than just these letters were being used, so I added the grid at the last minute.

Day 9
Prompt - trick

As well as making puzzles I write fiction and often draw on folklore, fairytale, myths and legends as source material. So it didn't take very long for my brain to make the connection between 'tricks' and the various 'trickster' archetypes from various stories and mythologies - Loki is perhaps the best known one, but there are plenty of others - and certainly (as I soon discovered) more than enough of them to theme a puzzle around.  Not all of these characters were familiar to me, and I enjoyed doing the research to find out about them. The important thing was to make sure the ones I chose weren't so obscure that it would be impossible for solvers to identify them even once they had recognised the theme - all of the names I've included should be easy enough to find by searching for 'trickster characters', or something similar.

Day 10 
Prompt - dots

It took me a while to come up with an idea for this one - other things I thought about included morse code and dot-to-dot drawings, and given that 'dots' is sometimes how musicians colloquially refer to sheet music I found myself annoyed that I'd already made that music puzzle a few days ago!  I'm trying not to repeat puzzle formats (and yes I know, I've already bent that rule with word searches, although I like to think I used them for two quite different purposes it's probably OK) and so that was off limits here. In the end, dominoes sprang to mind and I fairly hastily put something together. I wasn't particularly thrilled with it, to be honest - it felt a little too straight forward, and I would have liked to have found a way to make more of a connection between the solution word and the puzzle itself, or at least connect the solution to the flavour text somehow, but I couldn't find a way to do it. And I'm still annoyed that the dominoes don't make one single chain! But despite my misgivings I had a lovely message from someone saying how much they'd enjoyed it, which today of all days was particularly welcome. 

Day 11
Prompt - blank

Perhaps somewhat appropriately, I can't actually remember a lot about making this one! I think it was  straightforward enough though, I think  - not surprisingly, 'fill in the blanks' was a phrase which pretty instantly came to mind, and once I had that, the idea of filling those blanks with words made from the letters in 'BLANK' (plus one extra each time, for the extraction) came fairly quickly. 

Day 12
Prompt - branches.

This prompt really made me laugh. It's another one I saw when it was first posted because I was up late - this time because I was taking part in the Glyph2 puzzle hunt.  My team finished the first round of puzzles some time past midnight, and so it made sense to stay up a little longer and wait for the prompt to arrive. As it happens, one of the last puzzles we'd been working on involved doing all sorts of convoluted things with names of trees, and co-ordinates, and the London Tree Map (which I didn't know was a thing, but now I know very well.) So just when I thought I was finally done with trees...

I went to sleep with a few ideas including hidden names of trees, family trees, and branching databases rattling around in my head. When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I thought about was branching narratives, and whether I could create something based on an interactive text adventure. I've experimented with Twine, an open source tool for making them, before, but not in a long while, and my main memory of using it is that it's very easy for branching story lines to get unwieldy and out of hand.

"Don't be ridiculous," I told myself. "It's a lovely idea. But you can't learn re-learn  how to use Twine and use it to write an entire text-based adventure, all in one morning, just for the sake of making a puzzle."

And then, well...I kind of did do EXACTLY that. Twine is  actually very intuitive and easy to use; as it turns out the tricky part was working out how to share a finished twine project in a way which lets other people play it - for that I had to set up and itch.io account, so on the bright side at least now I have one of those.

One of the joys of Enigmarch has been that the time constraints and volume of puzzles required forces you to keep things relatively small and simple. In this case to be able to make a puzzle out of the story or, in other words, for solvers to be able to extract some sort of solution, I needed them to be able to get to all possible endings.  So I mapped out a nice small story with 8 possible paths, all of which lead to your untimely death (sorry about that, if you've played it). 

The dashes on the puzzle document indicating the format of the answer (2 words - 5 letters and 3 letters) was a last minute addition, but was definitely needed, I think - I wanted to make sure it was very clear that there was more to do than simply work through the various storylines; hopefully solvers will notice that there are 8 possible endings, matching the number of letters required, and also that  the first letters of these endings are A, B, C and so on. This provides a way to order the endings, and from there it's just a case of  noticing that one word in each of them has been italicised - the initial letters of the words in italics spell the final solution. 

I had SO much fun writing this. It's very tongue in cheek and a love letter, of sorts, to the text games  and choose your own adventure books I enjoyed as a kid.  The opening choice involving a decision about climbing a tree was partly inspired by the 'branch' prompt, of course, but also by the text adventure game  Zork.  And of course, once I'd made  one Zork reference, there was absolutely no way I could have anyone wander around a dark cave without being eaten by a grue. 

This is  the first puzzle I've written which uses an outside resource, rather than just being a simple print-and-play, or solve on screen affair, and it's definitely something I'd like to start doing more of. 

Day 13 
Prompt - nostalgia

If yesterday's prompt made me laugh, this one REALLY made me laugh... if only I'd known it was coming, I might have held off writing that text adventure game for one more day! On the bright side, needing to find something else to do  gave me a chance to dive into the world of 80s movies. I was very pleased with the drive-in sign generator I found online - I was actually imagining a standard movie marquee when I went looking for something to use, but I think the drive-in aspect adds to the retro feel. 

Day 14 
Prompt - irrational

It's Pi day, which (according to the organisers) was the reason for this prompt - I did toy briefly with doing something more maths based, but eventually settled on the idea of 'irrational' behaviour having to do with working outside of logical rules. I think four examples is just enough to work with to identify a pattern, which is why they are in groups of five; in my head, 'Miss Wilson' is a primary school teacher and these are her students, which is why some names are repeated. (It was originally going to be a parent yelling at their kids, but then I realised it was going to be way too difficult to use exactly the same names each time and have each of them be the exception to a different rule.)  I'd already come up with the solution word before I gave her a name, and having caught some of the the BAFTA awards on TV the night before, it felt like a nice little easter-egg to throw in. 

So there we have it - week two done and dusted! It's hard to believe we are almost half way through the challenge already - I'm still really loving it, although it's fair to say the prompts are definitely getting  a little trickier! Am looking forward to seeing what week three will bring.