2 Tone Game: Flags Design Notes

SPOILER WARNING

This page contains spoilers from the 2-Tone Game. If you haven't already played the game, you might want to do so before continuing reading this page.

Flags: a puzzle whose pieces had been rattling around in my brain since 2005.

One night in 2005, I played my first puzzle-huntish game thingy, BANG V. This game had the first puzzle so elegant that it brought me up short: Feeling Good! I liked the gimmick of encoding nonsense to make a sensical picture.

One day in 2005, I forgot to bring a book to read on my bus commute. So instead of reading, I stared out the window and thought about puzzles. A few stretches of Highway 101 between San Francisco and Mountain View are scenic; most are not. I saw plenty of auto body shops, auto lube shops, car repair shops. Some of these had checkered-flag logos. I sat and looked out the window. A puzzle was trapped in those flags, trying to get out.

So I put all that together. You might think I'm a freak for wanting to combine "Feeling Good!" with semaphore, but I'm not the only one.

This puzzle changed a little during playtest. Here's the original:

	j r q k c s j f r p b r m e v y b p r f
	y r p d d d d b f d d d p j d d d b f d d d v
	j p d d d g c d d j p d d d d b f t s f d d d d
	j r r p b r j d d d b f d d d d
	j p d d d d b f d d d d
	y r p d b f p j d d f r p b r m e d d v
	j p d d f b d d j p d d d d b f p j b f d d d d
	j p d d d f p b r r f j b d d d

I had little grid next to each clump of letters. I hoped that this would suggest a drawing, putting a letter into each grid square... but mostly it was a red herring. If you see a grid of 24 squares next to a sequence of less-than 24 letters, it's jarring.

So I ditched the grids for little racing car pictures. (I think that graphic might be a picture of an Alfa Romeo, to help with the metapuzzle. But I don't remember and the picture is so tiny that I can't tell anymore.)

Why did I pick SUNLIGHT as the answer? I wanted an answer that used many different letters, but not so many repeated letters. I couldn't render all letters, so the word could only use the letters CEFGHIJLNSTUZ. Of these, CILN were most legible, so I wanted to favor those. As you might expect, I wrote a little Python script to suggest words:

alpha = 'cefghijlnstuz'
for line in open('../../ref/pocket.txt'):
  if len(line) < 4: continue
  count = {}
  for c in line.strip():
    if not c in alpha: break
    count[c] = True
  else:
    score = 2 * len(count)
    if 'c' in count: score += 1
    if 'i' in count: score += 1
    if 'l' in count: score += 1
    if 'n' in count: score += 1
    score -= len(line)
    if score < 1: continue
    print score, line,

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