Breaking character
Yep, we're still here. Sort of.
It's a shame that G+ is gone. That's how we used to keep in touch with all of the puzzlers. We've had the reddit since 2013, but it doesn't feel the same. All of our puzzle assets got deleted when G+ went down. Sure, they're still in our huge Google Drive folder, but they're nowhere anyone public can access them other than on the Access Dive site.
Some of us have gone onto greener pastures, and some of us are still around, experimenting with other interactive fiction, with the hope that games could be better, more immersive, and, perhaps, more fun without players realizing it. Maybe you've seen our work somewhere and gotten enjoyment out of it. VI is everywhere, after all.
Personally, I miss making puzzles and running events. Puzzles were fun to witness critical thinking on, and dead drops were amazing to witness people perform minor miracles to find -- and place. The next puzzle I make will probably be something like the VI.OS disk image (which I still have sitting on my desk). It was a real floppy disk! Or the faux-NSA MIPS assembly. But never that hand optimized digital logic circuit again, I don't think I could ever design another one of those.
For this post, let's pay tribute to John Horton Conway, who died of COVID-19. On a day of remembrance, this seems fitting.
Lots of VI puzzles have working titles or codenames. This one was called "Conway" or "Cellular Automata" and is sitting in a drive folder alongside "Richard D. James Puzzle," "Primes," "Hellschrieber," and "Wardial Report." (Fun fact: the Wardial Report uses a real but sort of fictionalized text dump of the internal tools we used to build Access Dives.)
This puzzle was posted on the AD4 Console.
The first solution to this puzzle was to take the alpha channel of the image, and execute it in the Game of Life. You'd get a passcode made out of gliders. We used life-gen to encode it with a custom font.
Pretty straightforward. There exists a second code in the image metadata, encoded using a Brainfuck clone called Ook. An embedded PNG text segment holds a hint pointing to The Librarian from Discworld.
Which puzzle should I talk about next? Are there any where you wonder "how did they encode that" -- or, perhaps more likely, "what sadistic person came up with this?"
I helped write some of VI's puzzles. While I can't answer everything, you can ask me anything in the comments. Maybe I'm that sadist you're looking for...
It's a shame that G+ is gone. That's how we used to keep in touch with all of the puzzlers. We've had the reddit since 2013, but it doesn't feel the same. All of our puzzle assets got deleted when G+ went down. Sure, they're still in our huge Google Drive folder, but they're nowhere anyone public can access them other than on the Access Dive site.
Some of us have gone onto greener pastures, and some of us are still around, experimenting with other interactive fiction, with the hope that games could be better, more immersive, and, perhaps, more fun without players realizing it. Maybe you've seen our work somewhere and gotten enjoyment out of it. VI is everywhere, after all.
Personally, I miss making puzzles and running events. Puzzles were fun to witness critical thinking on, and dead drops were amazing to witness people perform minor miracles to find -- and place. The next puzzle I make will probably be something like the VI.OS disk image (which I still have sitting on my desk). It was a real floppy disk! Or the faux-NSA MIPS assembly. But never that hand optimized digital logic circuit again, I don't think I could ever design another one of those.
For this post, let's pay tribute to John Horton Conway, who died of COVID-19. On a day of remembrance, this seems fitting.
Lots of VI puzzles have working titles or codenames. This one was called "Conway" or "Cellular Automata" and is sitting in a drive folder alongside "Richard D. James Puzzle," "Primes," "Hellschrieber," and "Wardial Report." (Fun fact: the Wardial Report uses a real but sort of fictionalized text dump of the internal tools we used to build Access Dives.)
This puzzle was posted on the AD4 Console.
The first solution to this puzzle was to take the alpha channel of the image, and execute it in the Game of Life. You'd get a passcode made out of gliders. We used life-gen to encode it with a custom font.
Pretty straightforward. There exists a second code in the image metadata, encoded using a Brainfuck clone called Ook. An embedded PNG text segment holds a hint pointing to The Librarian from Discworld.
Which puzzle should I talk about next? Are there any where you wonder "how did they encode that" -- or, perhaps more likely, "what sadistic person came up with this?"
I helped write some of VI's puzzles. While I can't answer everything, you can ask me anything in the comments. Maybe I'm that sadist you're looking for...
I've got a few guesses about which puzzles will be asked about... let's see if they're right. :-)
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