A lot of stuff made it in to the 2-Tone game, but some things didn't make it in. These are some.
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.
I'm not the first one to use this idea, but I'll mention it anyhow.
I went into the playtests with too many puzzles. I'm glad I did. This meant I could tell playtesters "There are too many puzzles. One of the things I'm going to ask you at the end is 'Which puzzles do we cut?'"
I think this is useful for getting useful feedback from playtesters. Some of these folks knew me, but not all did. The ones who didn't know me might have restrained themselves from delivering harsh feedback on some puzzles. After all, lots of people ask for feedback, but not everybody takes that feedback well. The playtesters didn't know whether or not I was a tempermental artist.
So I was glad to be able to ask "Which puzzles do we cut?" It signalled that I was ready to listen to harsh feedback, that I was ready to act on feedback. I noticed a change in playtesters' facial expressions when they found out about "too many puzzles," like they were taking their role more seriously.
Anyhow, what got left out?
Crumble is a strategy boardgame. The board starts out with a black-and-white checkerboard pattern, but soon gets more complicated. It's thus thematic. And it's fun. And someone else went to the trouble of creating an online version in which you can play against a computer.
The online version is in nicely-written Javascript. It was sufficiently nicely written that I could figure out how to create a tweaked version: set up to always play human vs computer; and if the human won, the program displayed "The answer is ATARI." Now it was a puzzle/challenge: beat the computer.
I further tweaked the program so that the computer opponent would get "stupider" (more random) as play continued. Since I couldn't figure out how to give good time-released hints for a strategy game, instead, I'd let the game get gradually easier.
Sounds like an OK plan, right?
For the first playtest, I didn't get to watch the solve for this puzzle: the playtesters solved this at home after I was gone. They got through it OK, but it made it onto their list of "If you're going to cut a couple of puzzles, these are the puzzles to cut." OK, that made sense. This was an "odd duck", a strategy game in a set of puzzles. Still, I left this one in.
For the next playtest, the players encountered this puzzle while not-at-home. Thus, they tried to play the game on a mobile phone. This did not go well. Trying to view the game board on a small screen wasn't easy. When they "zoomed" their screen to look more closely at part of it, the game's code "helpfully" shrunk the board so that they could see the whole board. The players were struggling with the UI.
So I'm standing there watching this group of playtesters, and I'm figuring out where to dig in the code to turn of the automatic shrinking. And I'm thinking about how I'm going to dig up an iPhone and an Android phone for testing. And then I recognize this pattern of thinking. I've worked on many projects, software development, puzzle hunt, and otherwise. And in many projects there's this thing in the plan. And this thing ends up taking an inordinate amount of time and worry. Oh, we think we've got it all worked out, but we need to make sure everything will fit with the thing. And those things are always causing trouble right up until the end. You always wish you'd cut them early.
I pulled the puzzle right then. Crumble's a fun game, but I wasn't going to try to fit it into a puzzle hunt.
(Folks on the Bay Area Night Game mailing list will see "nonogram" and think Hey, that's not a "thing not used. He used a nonogram." Yeah, orginally, that was going to be a puzzle in the game. The version you saw was different, and tweaked to be an announcement for the game.)
I was making puzzles by mashing up classic puzzle designs with a checkerboard. So I made a nonogram ("color by numbers puzzle") with some squares already filled in: those squares in a checkerboard pattern. To extract an answer, I had the nonogram solve to a QR Code, a 2-D barcode. It encoded a message "boson type". The answer was HIGGS.
I knew this puzzle would be problematic, but was wrong about why. I thought the problem was: some people really don't like solving nonograms. I don't like solving nonograms, so I sympathize with these people.
But some people who disliked nonograms liked this puzzle very much. Some people who liked nonograms were not fond of this puzzle.
The difference, as near as I could tell, was: folks who didn't already know about QR Code barcodes were amazed when they found out that they'd drawn a barcode by hand. But people who already knew about QR Codes thought, What's the big deal?
So I took this puzzle out of the main part of the game and turned it into a pre-game announcement: this was how I introduced the web site to the local puzzle community. Instead of the old message, I made a new barcode that had the address of the site.
As a tribute to the excellent BANG V, I wanted to re-use a site that
would have fit well with the 2-Tone Game. But that site had a new
paint job, and no longer looked very 2-tone:
Stonestown Mall has a Vans store that had checkerboard decoration on the windows. The decoration didn't look permanent, though, so I didn't want to base a puzzle on it. A Hello Kitty store in Japantown mall had a checkerboard-painted ceiling with acoustic tile squares and with track lighting. There was probably a way to use that track lighting to identify particular ceiling regions, probably a way to encode a message. But I didn't really want to send a bunch of gamists into that store to stare at the ceiling, so I gave up on trying to puzzle-ify it. A stretch of sidewalk on Columbus Ave, a room in the City Lights bookstore, the basement of Barney's department store... I kept finding cool locations with checkerboards, but couldn't puzzle-ify them. Life goes on.