For a holiday contest, we definitely had a lot of participants. Twenty-seven is more than I expected, to be sure. There were lots of good puzzles in the collection. You guys did alright!
Let's identify the contest newcomers first. These folks are picking up a "
rookie bonus"
of 10 rank points apiece:
Chaco
Coppro
Tahnan
Zaratustra
I was bothered by spelling of the last handle, but I think "
Zaratustra"
is an Italian way to spell the superman's name. Am I right?
A consolation prize of 15 rank points goes to
Techant, who got royally snubbed when I left her entry out of the poll. (Accident!) She was a great sport about it, especially considering that people thought her entry would have been a strong contender in the polls.
3. Dali's entry #9...
Click here to view the secret text
×is pretty clever. Of course, I dutifully counted the I's and found five. I checked the answer, and thankfully, it wasn't anything so obvious. Hmm. Then I loaded it up in PhotoPaint and played with floodfills to be certain Dali wasn't putting some slightly off-white pixels in the rectangle. I craned my head sideways to see if maybe the rectangle itself could be considered an "I". No, not really, and besides, Dali clearly said "in this rectangle". Then I thought of wacky stuff like "am I inside of the rectangle, making another 'I'. Or maybe Dali is inside of the rectangle? Eyeballs? Maybe since I am looking at it, there are 'eyes' inside of..." No, no, my farfetched wordplay would not bring me any closer. I had previously dismissed the clue "complete with a number written in letters" as just an unecessarily precise description of the answer. But that was, in fact, the key to finding the solution. I particularly appreciate that after updating the blank spot inside with "five", the answer becomes "six" and comes to a final resting spot since both words contain an "I". The complete physics of Dali's box within a box are not spelled out at the start, making it hard to guess with confidence. Of course, if you explained the rules exactly, it would give away the answer. So maybe the puzzle works best as it is.
Nice job, Dali, and congratulations for your first placing in a contest! You've more than earned your 25 rank points.
2. Do my eyes deceive me, or has a rookie won second place for entry #7?
Click here to view the secret text
×
Tahnan's eyes were anything but deceptive--they led you straight to the answer! If that wasn't enough, Tahnan even screamed "eyes" at you so you'd pay more attention to them. But no doubt, like me, your DROD-playing reflexes kicked in and you started trying to figure out what Beethro could do in that room. How many people loaded up the editor, filled in the squares, and played through the little mini-room? If the explanation hadn't been available with an easy click, I'm pretty sure I would have. I hope nobody voted this puzzle lower because it contains some DROD elements. I think it is solvable by someone who has never played DROD before, and surprisingly, it might even be easier for the uninitiated to get the answer.
Tahnan gets 50 rank points for 2nd place, but wait... there's more...
1. Tahnan sweeped first place too, with his entry #13! Whenever a rookie wins a contest, it's kind of like some slick out-of-towner rolled in with his fancy suit and big city attitude to show us how it's done.
...no, actually, it's not like that all. Never mind.
Click here to view the secret text
×The picture immediately suggested the periodic table to me, as it probably would to anyone who took a high school chemistry class. Unfortunately, I hadn't looked at one of those things since high school. Fortunately, on Al Gore's internet, I can easily bring up any number of periodic tables within mere seconds, most of them containing accurate information. When the first square of Tahnan's table neatly matched Tungsten, I was relieved. "Hey, maybe I'll be smart enough to figure this out!" Sure enough, the letters of a secret question filled in nicely. And of course, this is more a testament to Tahnan's cleverness than mine, since it must have taken more work to piece together the question using the elements than it did for me to decode it. Next, I think Tahnan should use his skills to discover new dirty words that can be displayed on calculators.
Tahnan gets 100 more rank points for winning the contest (with rookie bonus, that's 160 points total) and is welcome to choose any prize of his liking from the
Prize Pile.
I'll award rank points in a few days. Thanks, everyone!
-Erik
____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
dev journals |
twitch stream |
youtube archive (NSFW)
And thanks everyone for the nice comments about my submission.
so here you go:
