#v2developer

[shinyjiggly]

I carved a pumpkin (another chronos pumpkin, I know) and this time I documented it completely!

I’m really proud at how well this design turned out. I did the initial drafting in ms paint, used some cool tricks with the circle tool, and then imported into gimp for the layering details. The initial draft was slightly more detailed, but I scaled back a couple of the details for the sake of my sanity and the tools at hand.

After that, I traced the design with a marker onto lined paper and lined it up onto the pumpkin. 

Then, the STABBING. Well, it was more like gently pushing a small knife into it, but whatever. This took a little while, and I’m surprised at how well I was able to keep it all aligned, considering this was a no-tape run.

Soon enough, I got it all prepped and ready for the squashsaw, or whatever the heck they call those blunt serrated instruments from carving kits. I actually got one from dollar tree and it’s actually p decent. I think it might actually be a little sturdier than the spendier ones, though it did bend a couple times when I overworked it. I used the squashsaw to cut out my chunks and with the end of a chopstick, I pushed them through to the inside. something about finally effortpunching those through is just so satisfying.

After getting the large pieces out of the way, I began thinning and smoothening the backside facing inwards. The facial features would be a bit tricky at this resolution.I wound up pulling it off with the squashsaw and a metal skewer. One for the sawing power, and the other to make more room once the openings were made. 

Considering I didn’t want to compromise the stability of the overall shape, I reduced the jawline to a slight angled line instead of making it cut through lie originally drafted. The eyes... they were really tricky. I wound up using the winged eyeliner shape within the eye area to keep the menacing suggestion. The timespace gear, I simplified to a mere circle. I’m already garbo at pulling off that shape at larger size, so I wasn’t about to risk any more by attempting such a tiny one. Also, the simplified version conveys the symbolism of the scene much clearer.

Which reminds me. You may be wondering: if Chronos is a time/space player, why is he framed by a time symbol and no space symbol? Well, the easy answer would be “His name is chronos, why the fuck would he not be framed by a fucking time symbol? (also his clawed hand looks slightly spacey idk)”, but there is a deeper reasoning than just that.

At least in v2reunion/lost pawns canon, Chronos was originally just a time player. (an ambitious as fuck time player, but that’s beside the point.) Now answer me this: how do you ascend to god tier? Easy: you die on your quest bed and let it do the rest of the work. Even harder question: how do you doubletier? 

Well, according to Recount Tale, The second aspect was granted via a glitch involving being the very first player in the session. In v2reunion/lost pawns canon (which I must remind you guys is probably quite far removed from original v1 canon), it was granted via a much more complicated web of factors, involving a parasitic virus that brings out the worst, most destructive traits in people (in addition to the potential to become a space player), proper entry into the v1 session via game disc... while at a space player’s house in another medium, and finally, dying somehow and being tossed onto (probably) a space aspect quest crypt. Needless to say I doubled down on the spacey shit for good measure.

Because of a certain fantroll based off of an infuriating hexidecimal color from a sbargv2 puzzle, and because overall it would be kinda brutal and symbolic at the same time, I had the cause of death be “heart ripped out of chest by future self”. Not only is it a timeloop that completes itself, but the person chronos once was has been robbed of his heart. He has been stripped of his humanity (which was already really weak if you remember Recount Tale). 

So yeah. You can p much blame me for chronos’s important timeloops being completed. But hey, I got friends out of it, so whatever.

[chaoseed]

SBARGV2 Dwarf Fortress "puzzle" flythrough

So at one point during SBARGV2, we wanted 12 puzzles, each corresponding to an aspect. Let me tell you, coming up with 12 puzzles on short notice is exhausting, to say the least. I had the idea to make a Dwarf Fortress, well, fortress, that the players could look through.

(It was originally supposed to be the Doom aspect puzzle, I think? But then someone else came up with a Doom one, so I made this Blood. I was going to dig down and release stuff, so as to make it truly Doomed...have the players looking around the fortress while it exploded, heh. But then I just said something about how Blood was everyone working together, like a fortress, etc.. You might get the impression we were a bit frazzled at this point and just wanted to get the puzzles done, and if so you would be right. ;) )

So the puzzle, such as it was, basically said "find the things from top down". The only hard bit was probably recognizing that this zip archive of random files was a DF save. Once you got it loaded up, you just had to look around for a couple minutes and write down what you found.

Some of the characters had subtle jokes, though, so:

3 - I built a tower waaay up above the main fortress, so, if you didn't specifically look up there, you might miss the 3. The 3 was made of gray stone with white and blue stone surrounding it; maybe a little hard to pick out, but consistent. I remember finding snow on the platform, so I built ANOTHER platform above it to keep the snow off!

p - A farm plot. More specifically a whole host of farm plots to make sure I got the shape right; the "joke" is that farm plots are built with the 'p' key...

2 - Bones and other corpse-type materials. This was all done with stockpiles and dumping unwanted stuff. Because refuse like this is shown as small 2s (in standard tilesets anyway), we have a giant 2 made of little 2s! Also, you'll see corpses of several megabeasts, or I think one of them is a night creature...I used DFHack to instantly slay these beasts so they wouldn't interfere with the fortress, heh. That was really the only cheating I did, nearly all the fortress was honestly built! (With one other tiny exception, noted below...)

p - Water. I wanted the various letters to be made of different "materials". I also wanted to go all the way from the ground down into the caverns, and even lower; so, the p was made from cavern water.

f - The f was made from channeled-out holes, since I thought that was a neat idea.

! - Magma. Of course I had to have magma! Also, things that are on fire have double exclamation points surrounding their names, so there's that. (Also, I used DFHack to reveal the map to find how low I had to dig to get to magma.)

[shinyjiggly]

hey matthewschutzner, open your ask box so we can contact you in a little more privacy than a public blog >:U

[shinyjiggly]

Glitchquest notes

Well, considering chaoseed mentioned some stuff on his end about the Helper 5000 puzzleset, I thought I might as well chip in on the explanation stuff.

For this one, I sorta wanted to make a walkaround, but didn't want to have another super-long hiatus like last time the openbound engine was used. So, I went for the next best thing: a non-linear puzzlequest-type thing.

As some of you might already know, we collected a list of errors that the players had "found" using the #v2errlog tag, and using what they came up with, we devised possible ways to fix them.

Glitchquest takes place in a zone known as the Skaian Magicant, a sort of debug zone/warp zone described in the SBURB Glitch FAQ. The goal of this puzzle is to somehow find a back-door to Skaia, so as to avoid the brunt of the glitch radiation from traveling through the cloud layers. Normally, it probably should have been put together with FF6 sprites, considering it's supposed to be based off of the sound test area from Alterniabound, but I felt like making some tiles from scratch instead.

Accurate to the FAQ, it begins when Seth clips into the ground and lands somewhere completely different. The obvious warp-pipe of the first room is to drive home the point of it being a warp zone.

Seth's sprites are in modified earthbound overworld style, to match the Prospit/Derse walkaround sprites. I mostly went for trying to show him as the dorky chump kid who's still figuring things out. Do note that this took place a couple weeks before he had began his path of destruction, so it still makes  perfect sense to convey his character in that fashion.

Many of the rooms were mostly there for either aesthetic value or to connect to places that we wanted to show off. A thing to note is that on each of the pages, there were layers of hidden text in the source, laden with commentary from Ornis.

The first junction is fairly simple in design. Four cardinal directions with a Light symbol on the floor for flavor (I guess you could make it a Mario 64 reference?).

The room to the west is filled with, wait for it... toilets. This is a reference to the error line in the enter flash where it says Porcelain Stolen, which had become slightly mematic after AE's post of a gif of Bafafeman stealing a porcelain vase. They are edited from the building puzzle toilets for top-down instead of platformer view. Apparently over the course of things, FL or somebody like that had busted the toilets, apparently in a vain attempt to search for treasure. (who the heck stores treasure in a toilet???)

The room right after that is a warp straight to the Bacafe cafe, which was a popular player-made location-turned hub area. 

Do note that the layout of this picture is intentionally inaccurate, as our staff never obtained the map of the room like we had attempted to get during Ornis's first visit. So I worked vaguely from the little I could glean from the logs that I had received (I'm still angry at avidCurator/billiardHounds for event-blocking me from accessing that event >_>). Unfortunately, because the actual puzzle apparently has authority over players and not everyone has the actual schematics, this became the base for the layout that most people recognized. Despite the stupid horrible mixup for the sake of staying undercover, I still consider this panel to be a favorite just because of Seth spinning on a barstool alone in the Bacafe. This room's source contained a string of numbers in it...

Below the Light Junction, there is a much more confusing junction. The west path there led to a room filled with prospitians in test-tubes, similar to the carapace experiments on the troll meteor lab.

Further from there was the gateway to the Spaghetti Code. A white and green cursor can be seen dragging a string of binary across the screen.In case you're wondering, the name of the page in binary doesn't really spell anything significant, in text it translates to :* apparently.

Fun fact: spaghetti code is a term used in programming that refers to code that's really hard to read due to being convolutedly structured, maybe even to the point where maybe even the original creator wouldn't be able to make sense of it anymore. This was in part, an internal excuse for bugfixing in-story taking so long. It is also another noodle symbol, which in a way sort of reveals that SBURB really is meant to be played cooperatively, it's right there in the code! (stap going so far with the noodle symbols sheesh) Another number string is in the source...

To the east of the weird junction is a split path, separated by a pile of unmovable boxes (which were referenced in the meteor basement dungeon event). The upper path leads to Ornis's workstation, with an oddly cryptic hint: "One 'o clock, what a position to begin at...". There is also a number string in the source here. Is this perhaps the beginning of something?

The lower path leads to an empty room containing the puzzlequest guy, passed out on the floor. Compared to other dersites in the same sprite style, he seems rather different looking, right? As expected by now, there is also a number string hiding here.

There is a path east of the Light Junction that leads to a library. It is here that Seth finds what appears to be Chronos' diary. I definately had a lot of fun writing entries for this. It basically drove home the fact that Chronos was in fact previously posing as the Guardian. All the while, there were hover-over messages in chronoquirk mocking the reader, as well as retorts in the page names. Another thing that was placed in there was revealing the previously hinted dangerous April fools joke that never happened, due to being too dangerous to execute (as well as the fact that Seth would have fallen for it and therefore screw up his plans).

At the end of the diary entries, there is a hint in the source: "around the clock it goes". This connects to the other hint that mentioned something about a clock. This hint was supposed to indicate the order of number strings.

As far south without warping, there is a room with some sparse furniture.

To the west of that is a warp leading to The Veil, conspicuously close to the Blue Hole. The blue hole was actually a very interesting submission by an act 2-3 hope player known as elaborateUtopianist. Because of the severity of it, as well as how much of a cop-out it would be to get rid of something that freaking huge and scary so easily, it was not fixed this round, instead waiting until the class puzzles to stall it and then having the players deal with it personally near the end. There is a number string here too, better write it down!

To the south of the couch room is a warp leading to Derse. There is a Dersite guard blocking the stairway leading down. At first it seems pretty normal, same exact layout as it had in the walkaround, but there's something different. The walls are scrawled upon with various messages, including the BNY code, a SBHJ face, the puzzlequest guy being eaten by the metal eel-thing, and the word "chump". It's unknown who exactly drew these. Perhaps it is best left a mystery. Grab the number string while you're here.

In the room to the east, there is a record player with some of the songs that were featured earlier in the story, as well as some others. The gramophone is heavily based off of the one from alterniabound, which is ripped straight from FF6. There is surprisingly, no number string in this one, only a cryptic hint: "a rift only reached by leaps". This is supposed to be a hint on how to get to Skaia, the leaps being manual url entering.

Once the players obtained all of the number strings, they would have to put them in clockwise room order, starting with the one at 1 'o clock: Ornis's workstation. If they got the number string correctly ordered, it would lead them to the boss battle, which chaoseed has covered already.

I really think this one turned out pretty fun and invoked the community effort and sense of discovery pretty well. It's not every day you get a puzzle quite like this.

[chaoseed]

SBARGV2: Glitch Boss Battle

As threatened, I'll now talk about the "Glitch Boss Battle", one of my favorite bits of Sbargv2. (I just created a "Full Transcript Page" for easy reading.)

First, the design. The idea was that it was a multiplayer puzzle. You have to go through and and choose the right series of choices; it's possible for one person to solve the puzzles and get the right choices first time (especially if they understand the references), but it's more likely that they will fail. Once you fail, you are barred from participating in the battle any more (the code saves your IP address, which of course isn't foolproof, but this is just a silly puzzle so whatever). In-universe, your "game over" is explained as a doomed timeline. But much like doomed timelines, you can still influence the course of events by giving information to other players.

So the idea is: Someone goes through and gets the wrong choice. They tell their fellow players, who try a different choice. Eventually someone stumbles upon the right combination of choices, and the puzzle is "won"! If you can figure out what's going on, you can get through it faster, or you can just throw enough players at it to brute force it. (Which makes sense in terms of the setting, I mean, look how many Aradias (Aradiae?) the trolls wound up with...) Incidentally, I don't actually know how difficult the players found this, or even if they liked it, so it would be cool if the players could speak up...

At this time in Sbargv2, glitches were A Thing, so that's what the battle focuses on. I wanted to have battles that focused on exploiting famous glitches from gaming, but I couldn't think of more than two, which is why the battle only has two "phases".

And besides glitches, the players were all god tier at this point (I think?). Anyway, the point is that I got to write incredibly over-the-top action scenes, with flying battleships fighting giant monsters, players dying, all sorts of crazy stuff. It was really fun, I don't write like that very often. :D

(Once the battle was won, I set it so that anyone could play through the battle any number of times, for "training purposes"...mainly so they could see all the cool things I wrote.)

So, because this post is already getting long, I'm going to save my specific commentary on things I wrote for below the Read More.

The first thing in the full transcript is the "Game Over" bit. Notice how it mentions doomed timelines.

The Monster Awakens--Several things to notice here. First, there's a glimpse of a white frog, which ties in to session stuff. Second, the Glitchboss' first phase is a reference to two classic NES games. First is a boss from Mega Man 1 called the "Rock Monster" or "Yellow Demon". (Notice the use of phrases like "mega-sized thing" and "demon formed of yellow rock.) There are also references to "spiky things with clawed arms and vertical mouths", as well as "giant eyeless frogs", both bosses from Blaster Master. Why these bosses? Keep reading...

"Fight" - This option is really just a better description of the Rock Monster in an attempt to get you to realize what it is.

"Item" - The macaroni and cheese is apparently a player in-joke, you'd have to ask Niki about that. ;) The rest is a description of what you might find in John's sylladex in early Homestuck...and an issue of Nintendo Power, which is another broad hint.

"Run" - The one interesting bit is the reference to the thirty-sixth stratagem.

"Blitz" - A command found in Final Fantasy 6 (III), which is really just foreshadowing the next phase...(I definitely had that video in mind when writing this.) (Also, "a storm of metal and fire" is a line from Eternal Darkness, although that doesn't mean anything except that I really like that game.) AND note that the "NES Advantage wired to the controls" is a reference to Ghostbusters II, the Ghostbusters controlling the Statue of Liberty!

"Inhale" - I think this is a reference to either Typhon (Chupon) or Atomos. (Again, Final Fantasy games.) I can't really remember. I don't remember what the "sylladex block" is about either...However, "Your last thoughts are a scrambled mess of misplaced tiles and static"--Personally I think that's incredibly creepy.

"PUASE" - Well, first of all this is partly a reference to SBaHJ and partly a reference to Problem Sleuth. But mostly it refers to the fact that the Rock Monster and Blaster Master bosses are both vulnerable to a "pause glitch"! You hit the monster, then pause (Blaster Master) or rapidly pause and unpause (Mega Man, or maybe this), causing your attack to "hit" the boss many times and ultimately defeat it in one shot. (And incidentally, after you defeat a boss in Blaster Master and then pause the game, when you unpause it the "victory fanfare" will play again. You can do this as many times as you like! That explains the last sentence.)

On to the next phase! "Death Takes Flight" is a reference to Deathgaze from Final Fantasy 6 (III). Notice the description of the creature--wings, horned skull--as well as the words "death" and "gaze". (Also notice the ship with a "Doom Cannon", that will be important.)

"Firaga" - In the early Final Fantasy game translations, spells were called "Fire1", "Fire2" and "Fire3", but in Japanese they were "Fire", "Fira" and "Firaga". So, "Firaga" is a hint toward Final Fantasy. It also shows that the monster is weak against fire and it uses cold attacks (Deathgaze uses "Blizzaga" as an attack). So, more hints.

"Nature's Eye" - This is a reference to my favorite game of all time, Master of Magic! It's a spell you cast on a city that increases scouting range around the city. The game doesn't go into detail about how the spell "works", so I decided it let you view events from the point of view of plants and animals. This also gave me the opportunity to write a rather creepy death scene. (Also, "death", "gaze", etc..)

"Invisibility" - This is the winning choice. Final Fantasy 6 has a bug called the Vanish-Doom bug. Many monsters are immune to "instant death" effects, but casting Vanish on them (i.e. making them invisible) causes them to mistakenly become vulnerable. So, I figured a Dersite battleship could have a "Doom Cannon" that would cause instant death, and once you cast invisibility on the monster, that would...do something. Hey, it's all glitches being exploited, it doesn't have to make sense! I kind of wanted an animated Homestuck "Doom" symbol, but I had no idea how to get that and the project artists were already working hard, so I settled for "THIS.DIE();". Also, this choice features the most over-the-top prose of the whole thing. The "diamond" (I pictured it as an octahedron, actually--well, diamonds are) isn't anything specific, but the bit about color washing back over the world is definitely inspired by Ōkami!

"Bigby's Crushing Hand" is a classic Dungeons & Dragons reference, of course! Ineffective, though. Gaze, death, you know the drill.

"Magic Missile" - Another D&D reference. (Also, "attacking the darkness".) (Also also, "gazebo".)

"XXXX" - An instant death spell from Final Fantasy 1. This gives a hint that 1) the spell is the "same" as the "Doom Cannon", and 2) the spell can't "find purchase" on the creature, another hint toward the bug.

And that, as they say, is that! I hope the players enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed creating it. ;)

[chaoseed]

SBARGV2: Helper 5000

So at a certain point in the game, glitches were running wild. (like dogs without horses) Anyway, they were running wild and the players had to ultimately fix them.

Now...I had some amazing ideas for this one. I'll just drop a little hint..."Multiplayer Minesweeper." Eh? Eh? In all seriousness, I think it would have been pretty cool, BUT it would have taken more time than I was able to devote to Sbargv2 at that point. So, we do what we always do: Punt.

The Helper 5000 console is a webpage featuring three puzzles. I'll move from right to left. The "picture" one was a simple "find the difference between two pictures", complicated by flashy glitch animation (this should probably have had a seizure warning on it, actually). I did the code for that, which wasn't too hard, the only difficulty being that I had to accept various different words as answers. (For example, once you figure out that there was a person in one picture missing in the other, you could have entered "guy", "dude", "human", "man", "woman" or "person".) The tricky bit for the players was that you have to enter every answer at once.

The middle puzzle was another one of the "quest page adventure" things. Niki designed and did artwork for both of these puzzles; I don't really remember what glitchquest was all about (I wrote up the webpages though).

The left puzzle, though...heh. I'm kind of proud of this one. It's a series of mini-puzzles; simple, but randomly generated so that there is more or less an infinite number of them. The idea is that you face glitches in the form of "obstacles", and you have to choose one of three options to meet the obstacle. These options are Pokemon fusions. You have to use your knowledge of Pokemon types (specifically Gen 1 ones!) to guess which Pokemon is super effective.

Then, behind the scenes, the number of puzzles solved was recorded. After a while we just said "You guys solved enough puzzles, great job!" and went on to the next thing. So it was a team effort.

The coding for the Pokemon puzzle was pretty easy (Ajax was the trickiest part). It was surprisingly simple to get the webpage to display a given fusion of two Pokemon by linking to the image from the Pokemon fusion server. I made up a series of puzzles, and I decided how to solve them: the fire one would be beaten by a water type, bug beaten by poison, and so on. (Gen 1, remember!) Then, for each puzzle I had a list of "barred" types so they wouldn't confuse the issue: for the bug puzzle I ONLY wanted poison to be the answer, so I barred fire (also super effective against bug). I went through the list of Pokemon then available on the fusion site, and I found all the ones that looked like they could be used in one of these puzzles. Then I put them and their types in a database. The rest was really just connecting it all together.

So here's how it looks in real life: I load an obstacle and see "SOMETHING is sending out waves of malignant thought! You can't even look at it closely, the psychic turmoil giving you a headache.". So that's a psychic obstacle, and bug beats psychic. The three fusions I see are Magikarp/Venomoth, Kingler/Lickitung (I think?) and Slowpoke/Blastoise...obviously the one with Venomoth is the answer, so i click that and see: "Your companion dives in and attacks the whatever-it-is, the psychic attack apparently ineffective against its efficient insect mind. The threat is soon vanquished.". Woo!

Stay tuned, some day soon I'll talk about the Glitch Boss Final Battle!

[shinyjiggly]

The captchalogue card hunt: part 2

Link to part 1

Because nobody went out to find the irl captchacards, we had to make a back-up puzzle that didn't involve physical locations.

We still wanted the players to find the captchalogue cards, but we had to figure out a way for them to seek them out that would be easy to put together and hard for them to figure out as a punishment for not taking the easy route and looking for the physical ones. We decided to hide links to them on webpages.

Kaylen got in contact with the folks who ran the MSPA wiki and we were able to hide four hyperlinks on four pages of choice. To keep things simple, we chose pages that had to do with the previously posted picture hints, and modified the QR codes. So as to make it more difficult, we added another step to the process. The hyperlinks that were once on these pages led to puzzle pages. (The hyperlinks on the MSPA wiki were taken down after entry, when they weren't needed anymore, but the puzzle pages themselves remain up. Now they can be found on a particular page on the SBARGv2 wiki, and are heavily hinted by a doodle I did a while back when the pages were already found.)

In the source for each of these pages was an encrypted message and a hint of some sort regarding which cipher to use. The ciphers were set up with a program called Cipher Classics. At some point, a second set of hints were distributed as a response to an ask, cryptically confirming the existence of magic.

On that page, a series of hints were placed in the source, each leading to different webpages. These pages contained references to previous puzzles, such as the unaccounted pumpkin error code and the twocanplay.wav puzzle. Key words from these puzzles turned out to be the keys needed to crack the codes.

Many of the puzzles were solved after a large amount of puzzlesolving efforts. It was at this time that another was introduced, under the handle sourFruit. He was there to spark discussion about the ciphers. As those who remember him from act 4, sourFruit was the Prince of Space known as Brae, with Kaylen as his psuedoexile. Eventually though, he "found" the program used and the others were able to finally solve the remaining ciphers.

At the end of each cipher, there was a 3D rotating punched card (made by madmonkey), each with a code that matched its physical counterpart. The players had to figure out the captchalogue code from the punched hole patterns. This was relatively easy, considering there's a tool to be able to do that already.

Once all four captchalogue codes were entered, a confirmation post was posted and the [S] Enter sequence was posted the next day.

[shinyjiggly]

Happy session entry anniversary! To celebrate, here's the half-finished version of a year old flash with annotations and a pause button.

[chaoseed]

So what about Ash and I getting the same land name?

Well. The short answer is: I didn’t bother checking to make sure there were repeats. I assumed there would be enough possible lands that it wouldn’t be an issue. Obviously, though, that’s not the case (especially with regards to Space).

This is a great time for me to talk about the land generation algorithm, though!

First, go ahead and try the Land Test Page. Click “GENERATE!” a few times to generate lands. I used this to test that the algorithm worked.

So how does it work? I’m not going to provide the source, because the difficult part is not the coding, it’s the data. You’ll see…

The test page actually accesses another program which you might almost think of as an API. Depending on parameters passed, it returns one land tied to an aspect, multiple lands or a full set of lands, one for each Aspect. That’s all convenience, though; the core of the program is the bit that, when given an Aspect, generates a land for it.

Each land is a combination of two words; I call them “themes”. For example, John’s land is “The Land of Wind and Shade”; the two themes are thus “Wind” and “Shade”. After poring over the list of player lands (ignoring the alpha humans’ lands, ‘cause they have their own thing going), I noticed a couple of patterns. These patterns didn’t necessarily hold for every land, which is why I say “patterns” instead of “rules”; however, I decided to make them rules for my program, since it would make things a little more interesting than just random choices… And it would usually result in lands that “sounded” Homestuck-ish.

One theme always has some connection, however vague, with the player’s Aspect. (I call this the “aspect-oriented theme”.)

The first theme always has one syllable. The second may have one, two or even three as in Aradia’s land. (Nepeta’s land breaks this rule, but, well.)

A Space player’s aspect-oriented theme is always Frogs. No one else ever has Frogs as a theme.

The process of choosing the themes is therefore straightforward:

First randomly choose an Aspect-oriented theme. If Space, Frogs. Otherwise look up one from the database that’s tied to the given aspect.

Next choose a random theme from all themes. (Not Frogs!) If the first theme has more than one syllable, make sure the second has one syllable.

Switch the themes if necessary: If one of the themes has more than one syllable, make sure it comes second. If they both have one syllable, switch them half the time (random chance).

So it should be obvious at this point that most of the work went into creating the database. I have two tables: land_theme, which holds each theme and its number of syllables, and land_theme_by_aspect, which holds all theme-aspect correspondences. (Not all themes are tied to an aspect at all. And some themes are tied to more than one aspect!)

In order to create the list of themes, I looked at the SBARG1 wiki and recorded all the themes. I removed ones I didn’t like, and I added a bunch that occurred to me. Then I wrote down the syllables and possible Aspect correspondences for each one, and I put it all into database tables. And then I showed the other SBARGV2 devs, and I started making changes based on feedback…For days.

I think, in the end, it was worth it though. ;)

(Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed the “Consorts” checkbox on the land test page. You can go ahead and try it. I didn’t quite get it finished in time, so it never made it into the game. Some of the results are a little odd…Fun though!)

[shinyjiggly]

==> Sleep and the endless 2-month long hiatus

(link to the prototype story)

If anyone remembers last year, they would probably remember the great wait of January in which had absolutely no puzzle updates at all. This was around when the SBARGv2 Hotel RP was in full swing (I still miss the old hotel days...).

Anyways, while the players were bored out of their minds, the dev team was mostly hard at work with the walkaround. This walkaround was basically supposed to give some hints about the nature of the session and the issues plaguing it. It was decided early on that we would be using the HTML5 Openbound walkaround engine. mastermoridin Was our head programmer and I was the main pixel artist. Kaylen was the main dialogue writer. chaoseed did the flash animating while I drew the assets. kyntello did the two main tracks called "Dersings" and "Prospitar". I did the cruddy loops that played during the cutscenes.

Fun fact: I recorded something and reversed it with the whispers of the Furthest Ring thing and hid it in a way so that one could barely tell if it was even saying anything legit while backwards at all. This was of course, before it was announced that horrorterrors weren't even a thing this time around (I really wish I would have been told that vital piece of information BEFORE we were already in the session... >_>)

To begin, I started out working on the base tileset.

I pretty much just tried to cover the basics: tacky wallpaper, stairs, railing, doors, bricks, roof tiling, and other stuff. I worked with a fairly limited palette to keep it consistent and easy to pallette-swap precisely. 

Before we settled on openbound, I did some tests with the tileset using Game maker. But, because I was pretty much the only one who could use game maker and  didn't have enough experience to make a proper textbox engine (not to mention the fact that since I only had the standard edition of Game Maker Studio, exporting to html5 was out of the question.)

here's some pics of it in action though:

The mask in this version was drawn separately from the main walksprite. Because I hadn't made the walksprite for the player yet, I pulled out a custom one done in earthbound style (once I get enough money for a Wii U, I will eventually play that game!).

Because of the use of a different engine, i had to find an efficient method to put a room layout together with a tileset. I eventually found a program called Tiled. It worked pretty well for what I needed it for. Eventually though, I switched to just using GIMP to make the process of also doing the collision maps go smoother and to allow for custom non-tileset stuff. One thing I'm kinda proud of though, is how I managed to utilize alpha transparency with some of the larger objects, like the pillars and the other foreground stuff.

After that, I started work on the walksprites and talksprites, trying to keep within the limitations of the style. The player's walksprite was a heavily edited version of Ness's walksprite while wearing pajamas.

This is the beta version of the sprite without the mask. As you can see, it's Seth with the chronohorns. This was way way before his backstory was changed and because of that, his horns were said to be naturally occurring for some odd reason. But that's a topic for another time.

The carapacian walksprites were completely custom. I studied the officially used ones in Seer: Descend, and I decided to go with a different style that had actual outlines. The talksprites however, were modeled fairly close to their canon counterparts.

Because this was before I had Flash, chaoseed had to put the flashes together, and I only pretty much made the assets.

Much of the time not spent working on sprites was spent waiting on others to get their parts done. Unfortunately, mastermordin had a bunch of school things to complete during that time and thus didn't exactly have the highest amount of motivation or concentration to work on putting the areas together. Also, he was new to the SBURBML format, so it wasn't exactly the easiest thing to work on. Because of limitations on what we knew how to do within that timespan, a lot of features, characters, and various other things were cut.

This kinda sucked beause I spent so much time on those walksprites and talksprites for them to all wind up becoming unused...

Benny was one of these additions that never made it in. He was supposed to be the "version exclusive" for the prospit walkaround. The version exclusive was a sassy dersite lady by the name of "Suds Sue", with a pink outfit and a mask made of bubbles.

One day, I'd like to return to this particular project and redo it so that it wasn't so unfinished, but in a way, it could be said that it was a reflection of the current state of the session after only that long of Chronos editing and compiling the source code to make it work properly.

(though considering that I have figured out how to make a working textbox engine in Game Maker, the improved version might be in that engine instead, if I ever finish with my current long-term project first.)

[shinyjiggly]

Templequest

For the end of the mayan calender, we wanted to throw together something cool for the occasion. Some folks on the team wanted entry to be on that date, but that of course was completely out of the question, considering we still had plans for the dreamer walkaround and didn't have the time to whip up a flash animation for ==> Enter.

So, we brought back an old favorite: the puzzlequest guy. Though this time, we had him in an actual time and place, of course being December 22nd, 2012, somewhere in a South American jungle. His mission: to seek out the mysterious Frog Temple.

At first, I had plans to have splitting routes like puzzlequest had, but because of a lack of days to work on things, a lack of puzzles, and a lack of ideas for alt routes, it was kept linear, aside from the various death scenes if one happened to get a puzzle wrong.

The panels in this one were done by timetravlur, myself, and wistfulcritic. (I think astraySheep might have contributed, but I can't exactly remember all that well)

The intro with the meteor impact was my thing. I sorta wanted to give the players a feel for the setting. I tried to get the phase of the moon as accurate for that date and location as possible. It of course was facing the other direction because of the area being south of the equator.

There was an actual reason for the intro character being a hippie kid camper. I had heard from my dad just a couple weeks before then that there were a bunch of hippies that actually went down there on that day for some reason, hence the peace necklace. (before you ask: this kid probably got hit by meteors during the reckoning on behalf of not being interested in following dubious puzzle blogs).

Also, as an addded bonus, he served as a contrast to the puzzlequest guy in terms of physical build to show that the puzzlequest guy's design wasn't merely a stylistic choice anymore: he was actually a somewhat short dersite with an odd mutation. Hippie kid, on the other hand, was just a regular human.

The first puzzle of Templequest involved deciphering some hard-to-read text written in a pigpen cipher. For the design of the fallen object, I wanted to give it an ancient feel, like something that could be found in a pseudo-mayan temple of sorts.The words inscribed on there were "Continue and Find truth", which is kinda funny, considering how much Chronos had been lying to them.

Next up was the timeskip to next morning, drawn by TT. At this point, puzzlequest guy has been established as a curious but determined Indiana Jones rip-off, minus the headgear or cool equipment. In hindsight, I'm still not sure who was driving that plane, or who would even give a short carapace alien dude a lift in the first place. I have to say though, TT's work is beautiful and conveys great depth to the scenery.

Once we hit ground level, wistfulCritic took over, as can be seen by the swooping sketchy shading and highlighting. I really like how she drew that jaguar. Anyways, the second puzzle was less of a puzzle and more of a hidden joke. The question was: which side of a jaguar has the most spots? The answer, as anyone with a snarky sense of humor could easily guess, was the outside. Any other side, and puzzlequest guy would be bleeding on the jungle floor. This was suggested to be used as a puzzle by Kaylen.

At the cliffs, it was my turn again to pick up the pen. Of course this one was more of a trial and error than an actual puzzle. Basically, the answer is middle/center and any other answer would cause him to fall to his doom.

At this point, WC did a transition jungle frame and then TT did an awesome pic of the frog temple:

20 zillion steps later, we arrive at the front door, which is shut tight. I drew that door. The puzzle for this one (which was done by chaoseed), is as follows: "There is an old story about religious devotees who believed, when the great NUMBER of names of God were all listed, the world would end". This was a reference to a sci-fi short story by the name of "The Nine Billion Names of God". The answer was of course, “9000000000”. I'm guessing it was chosen as a reminder for the huge amount of players in v1? (I actually have no idea)

Now we have entered the sacred Frog Temple. I pretty much drew everything from here on out. The froglyphs on the walls were ripped from a homestuck panel, I think somewhere in act 3 or 4? (also, try listening to Rana's Abode from the SBURB OST while at this part, it's totally awesome)

Eventually, we make it to a standard temple trap. One that could easily be built in minecraft probably.The puzzle for this one was also written by chaoseed: "listen: i8mz9uOvFQA t4H_Zoh7G5A learn of the ancient song" These were youtube links which led to two different versions of a popular Bolivian folk song known as "Llorando se fue". This was put in for setting purposes. For those who did not get the correct song name, (or typed in the lambada or whatever), they were treated to a trio of very large and sharp needles dart arrow thingies.

Of course, as per the law of 8^y, stairs hapened on the way down to the basement.

I do have to say: drawing that lotus time capsule was definitely difficult. At this point, we finally learn the name of the puzzlequest guy... (or do we?) Actually, the name was a placeholder to refer to the players, though the puzzlequest guy didn't really know the reason behind the note at all, not that he had much more time left to live, considering what was shown here and confirmed later in Sethquest.

Despite the previously unshown delayed shocker ending, the players were given one last and very important puzzle: they had to translate this block of glyphs into numbers 1-6. T arrange this, I had looked all over for a bitmap font tool, which allowed me to arrange the six different glyphs on a strip type a bunch of numbers, paste it into the program, and then get a lovely custom frog temple glyph thing to be deciphered.

As some may remember, this one was made slightly difficult due to the fact that the main puzzle-solver, noodleConnoisseur, had accidentally only a couple of the glyphs, and therefore, it didn't match up until he finally decided to re-do the translation again. This code, of course, was representative of the SBARG base code, needed to cement the manifestation of the impossible session. It was because of this code that the vanilla timeline and the session's alpha timeline were able to split in the first place, which as we all know, has had a great impact on the  (starting at the point of dissapearifying the pumpkins, of course).

It is unknown who actually sent the letter. It is assumed that it might have been Chronos, considering that he did call himself "The Guardian", but at the same time, it could have been from Ornis, either before or after being locked in a capsule. This has not been confirmed either way.

The main reason Chronos wanted the puzzlequest guy down there was for his arm, which was specifically tailored to Chronos's needs. Due to his general instability, he needed something a bit more solid to keep his form.

Also, another plan, which did not pan out quite as planned, was that he could have tried to use it to tap into the power of one of the rings 100-fold, but unfortunately was never able to get his (or the puzzlequest guy's) hands on either of them. Most likely apocalypseGambit is the one to thank for this, thanks to her continued reported efforts of messing around with things on Derse. Another point: it was never properly tested to see if the rings would even work correctly with a grafted carapace arm.

This arm of course did not last long. By the time of Chronos's death, it had already been converted into tar, similar to how the things thrown into the boiler of the paradox machina turned to tar.

(Okay, I should REALLY be getting to bed now. It's like, 3:30am or something.)

[chaoseed]

SBARGV2: Player Codes Explained

So one of the aspects (haha) of SBARGV2 was that players were randomly assigned a "player code", which was 8 alphanumeric characters like a captcha code, and a land, which was of the form "Land of Cogs and Portals" or something like that. Eventually, after solving various puzzles and "repairing" Sburb, they were able to decode the player code into a class and aspect ("classpect"); Knight of Breath, Rogue of Mind, etc.. (Also, if you were watching closely, you would realize that the land had something to do with your classpect--well, specifically your aspect; all Space players had a "Frogs" land, for example.)

The point is that the player code contained the classpect within it. But how did it do so? Well, read on and find out...(I could have just had the code be a key into a database where the classpect was stored, but this seemed somehow more robust...and interesting!)

All (nearly all) the source code is available here. It's all PHP. Not only that, here's a simple webpage to generate codes based on classpects and decode codes back into classpects. The code is rather complicated, though, so I'll explain.

As John points out in Act 3 of Homestuck, a captcha code encodes 48 bits of information. There are 12 aspects and 12 classes (not counting Muse and "Lord", I didn't want to bother with those), which makes for 144 classes; in other words, a value from 0 to 143. But that's not even 8 bits of information. When I realized this, I figured I could use the "extra" information to make the code robust, so that if a player mis-recorded one or two letters, they'd still get the same classpect. I also wanted the codes to be "random", in the sense that even if the players collected a bunch of codes and corresponding classpects, it would be difficult to figure out the algorithm. To that end, I decided that some of those bits would be "taken up" by randomness. If the program were run twice, for example, and it got "Knight of Mind" both times, then it would produce two different codes--and ideally, those codes would not look anything like each other. But they'd still both decode to "Knight of Mind"!

I started reading about error correction, but it was stuff I didn't know much about; I wasn't making much progress learning about it, and my quick overview wasn't turning up anything that exactly fit my needs. So, after thinking about it in the shower (not really on purpose, it's just that I often seem to get ideas in the shower) I decided to create my own algorithm.

Okay, now's when you can start following along with the source code. First, lib_code.php has a bunch of utility stuff. You create an "encoding object", and then you can do stuff like: Record 9 bits, then 9 bits, then 10 bits, then 10 bits, then 10 bits...and since that's 48 bits, you can encode them into a captcha code. You can also input a captcha code and have it turned into 48 bits. This forms the foundation of our later manipulations. (There's also some debug/testing stuff. Believe me, I tested the whole thing thoroughly!)

Now, to reveal the secret of the entire thing: A classpect is encoded within a captcha code five times. Therefore, when a code is decoded, you get five answers for the classpect. Whichever answer appears the most often is the one considered the "true" answer. This is how we do "error correction"; if mis-recorded letters result in as many as three wrong answers, as long as those wrong answers are different from each other (very likely, if the mistakes are random), there will be two right answers to overrule the wrong ones. This makes the code quite robust. (m_ClasspectFromCode performs this decoding operation, but there are a bunch of mysterious numbers involved. I'll explain those eventually!)

So how do we encode a number from 0-143 five times in 48 bits? Some of you might guess that my example above had something to do with it. We encode the number in 9 bits, again in 9 bits, in 10 bits, 10 bits again and 10 bits one more time--and that all adds up to 48 bits.

Now, 9 bits is a number from 0-511, and 10 bits is a number from 0-1023. That's a lot of "space" left over, so here's where we put randomness. The m_RandEncCl9 and m_RandEncCl10 functions take care of this. m_RandEncCl9 generates a number from 0 to 2 ("mt_rand() % 3") and multiplies it by 144, then adds the classpect. In other words, our number from 0-143 is added to 0, 144 or 288. So we get a number from 0 to 431. This can easily fit into 9 bits. Similarly, m_RandEncCl10 generates a number from 0 to 6, * 144, + classpect = a number from 0 to 1007, which fits into 10 bits. (I basically arrived at these numbers by playing around and multiplying stuff.)

How do we decode that operation? Like, how do we take our number from 0 to 1007 and get back our number from 0 to 143? Simple, we do modulo 144. This gives us the remainder when dividing by 144, and since the random numbers are all multiples of 144, and the number we care about is less than 144, it all works. (m_DecCl9, m_DecCl10) The cool thing about this is that the same classpect can be encoded as very different numbers: "1" could be 1, 145 or 289.

But there's one more wrinkle! Looking at the m_ClasspectFromCode and m_CodeFromClasspect functions, everything should be clear...except for a bunch of strange numbers floating around. This was an extra layer of encoding to make the whole thing completely impossible to decode. (Well, an actual cryptographer could probably crack it pretty easily, especially if they could get access to generate and decode thousands of numbers, but for the players of this ARG...)

Here's a very useful mathematical fact. Let's say you have a "base" which is some positive integer. You have some number, let's call it the "text", which is a positive integer ranging from (at most) 0 to base-1. Choose a "multiplier" which is relatively prime to the base.

(I remember talking about math to a friend of mine, and I said "relatively prime" and she kind of freaked out--"Numbers should be prime or not prime, what's 'relatively prime'?". It sounds weird, yeah, but "relatively prime" just means that they don't have any divisors in common. 15 and 26 are relatively prime because they don't share any divisors: 3, 5 and 2, 13. However, 15 and 27 are not relatively prime because they share the divisor 3. So numbers are relatively prime if and only if their gcd is 1.)

Okay, now for the mathematical fact. If you multiply the text * the multiplier and then take the result modulo the base, every possible value of the text will become a different value in the result. (By which I mean, different from each other; 0 will always "become" 0, so it's not different, but it's different from everything else.) In other words, you haven't destroyed the information, you've preserved it...You've simply encoded it a bit. How do you get the original number back? Well, you multiply by the multiplicative inverse modulo the base.

Therefore, if you want to obscure a number (and it's a positive integer within a fixed range), you multiply by some random number relatively prime to the base, then take the result modulo the base. (You can also add a random constant somewhere in there, just be sure to subtract it when decoding.) This is what m_CodeFromClasspect and m_ClasspectFromCode do. In m_CodeFromClasspect, the first 9-bit number (a number from 0 to 511, well technically 0 to 431 but whatever) is multiplied by 13, added to 99 and modulo 512. Then in m_ClasspectFromCode we add 413 (which is like subtracting 99 in base 512; also haha 413), we multiply by 197 (multiplicative inverse of 13 modulo 512) and modulo 512. Whew!

And then we do the same thing for the other four times the number is encoded, with different constants.

(How do we know that 197 is the multiplicative inverse of 13 modulo 512? There are algorithms and stuff, but nowadays you can just ask Wolfram Alpha!)

...Okay. So that's enough for you to understand the source code, if you know PHP. Of course, sharp-eyed coders may have spotted the bit that chooses the player land--done by calling another program! But more on that later...

[shinyjiggly]

Notes: This did not make it into volume 2 for obvious reasons (the main one being that it's literally just a watered down Elevatorstuck with a couple different instruments and isn't even original).

[chaoseed]

SBARGv2: The tracker puzzle (part...3?)

Part 1

The Legend of Bacafe: the beginninging

Puzzle 5 was pretty simple: Translate "A" to "1", "B" to "2" and so on, AND translate "1" to "A", "2" to "B", etc..

Puzzle 7 came from me reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms. If you read about the Battle of Red Cliffs with the phrase "TWO LEADERS" in your mind, you'll eventually come up with the answer "LiuBeiSunQuan".

Puzzle 8 was done by Kaylen, intended to be like a folktale. In terms of puzzling, all you have to do is pick out the italicized letters.

Now, Puzzle 4, "Wading Through the SLUS Pile", is one of my favorites. It's not hard, but it allowed for some interesting implications. The clue is "slash w3x6xtqy". You're supposed to guess that you need to visit some URL involving that sequence of characters. If you guess "pastebin", you'll get to a pastebin page; the name of the page and its first line are "WADING THROUGH THE SLUS PILE" to tell you you're on the right track. The file is a list of entries, each having a number and then a series of "blanks", like this:

21397

*------ -: ------ --------

Each line has a "*" in some position. So, the obvious thing to do is find what fills in the blanks and take whatever character is in the * spot. But what goes in those blanks?

A "slush pile" is "a set of unsolicited manuscripts sent to a publisher". But the puzzle says "SLUS". HMMMM. What you're supposed to do (as always) is Google it. If you Google "21397 slus" the first entry that pops up is:

Disgaea 2 - Cursed Memories [SLUS 21397] (U) - PCSX2 Forums

Aha! The serial number of the game Disgaea 2 - Cursed Memories is "SLUS-21397". In fact all these SLUS numbers are serial numbers of PS2 games. Notice that "Disgaea 2 - Cursed Memories" fits in the series of blanks under 21397; some listings use a hyphen and some a colon, but it's an obvious fit.

So that's the puzzle: look up serial numbers of PS2 games. The cool thing is that I got to choose game titles to put in the puzzle. I chose some that I really love, some that hinted at some aspect of the game, and some that...Well, the full list is long, so I'm going to put it under a Read More. ;)

(Incidentally, "Sony Index" is the site I used when picking titles and serial numbers!)

21397 Disgaea 2 - Cursed Memories (a sequel, plus players had memories of Sbargv1)

20158 Heroes of Might and Magic (players)

21722 Chaos Wars (aside from the obvious, this is a rather obscure game that I happen to own)

97213 Dark Cloud 2 (great game, sequel, features time travel)

21680 Harvey Birdman - Attorney at Law (birdman = Ornis)

21439 Destroy All Humans! 2 (Chronos, the sequel)

21603 Soul Nomad & the World Eaters (one of my FAVORITE games, also the title has various implications)

29056 Alter Echo [Demo] (I don't know anything about this game, I guess it just sounded time travel-y)

21152 Shin Megami Tensei - Digital Devil Saga 2 ("Digital Devil Saga 2" - eh? eh?)

21133 Xenosaga Episode 2 - Jenseits von Gut und Bose, Disc 2 (sequel, plus "disc 2 of 2"; the title means "beyond good and evil")

20028 No One Lives Forever (god tier stuff?)

20562 .hack Part 2 - Mutation (sequel mutation)

20664 Barbie Horse Adventures - Wild Horse Rescue (HUSSIEEEEEEEE)

[shinyjiggly]

prototype story for ==> Dream

List of things that did not make it in:

multiple swappable masks

the ambassador and the tailor

some of the more personal lines of text

the hooded figure

the not-so-subtle jabs at the other SBARG timelines (half of the reason why it took place during a ball was because the others were having parties and balls some time around the planning stage)

the furthest ring actually mentioning anything relevant at all, let alone about the next puzzletrail (there is an easter egg message encoded in the audio)

the transportalizers (which would have made a lot more sense than just going downstairs to the courtyard)

a dancefloor that was actually populated

hints about the guardian's appearance (technically they could have been for either one)

the glass mask ending (which might have been kinda cool for a symbolic ending)

[shinyjiggly]

Macaroni and cheese

What is it with macaroni and cheese? why is it there? what does it mean?

At some point soon after, doctorSpace, someone who had rolled a class that made him have to go through Textquest, mentioned in the incip memo that the food replicator in the Bacafe at the LoIaR HQ had a fatal error that would have caused it to generate enough mac-n-cheese to drown/crush/suffocate everyone on the 2nd floor. Of course, it was fixed before that would have been a thing, but it was hilarious and inspiring nonetheless. This became the basis of the macaroni room in the meteor basement dungeon.

During that part, I let SJ to captchalogue a cubic meter of it for later. It was also used as replacement fuel for the paradox machina, but that kinda gummed up the machine due to the cheese. During Sethquest, it was revealed that Seth still had macaroni in his sylladex, as shown when he shared some with Benny. Meanwhile, SJ had duped and frozen the macaroni cube for food while out and about/physical ice-type attacks/partially floating platforms in watery areas. During thanksgiving though, Seth had no idea what to bring, considering he probably doesn't know that many recipes.

Really, sharing of the macaroni is a strong indicator of trust and bonding, at least when it comes to being around Seth (this is made slightly funnier considering that Noodles, his server/client player, is a blood player). SJ, on the other hand, had mastered the art of making macaroni due to making dinner for her brother so many times, but still had access to other recipes. And instead of really offering it to others, she really mostly only used it for her own needs and when others asked for it (and eventually got burnt out on it).

So while these two Time players both had their stints with the macaroni, they both treated them differently. (Also, one last note: the casserole dish in the thanksgiving pic is totally based off of the one my mom has.)