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Careful: I'm pretty blasé about spoilers for this year-old hunt. If you haven't already solved the puzzles you wanted to solve, maybe don't keep reading.
Every so often, fearless leader Corey sent out a "State of the Hunt" email. Here are some excerpts from such April emails to let you know what the writing team was doing. (And to remind me, as I write this, what we were doing.)
Here's something from mid-April:
Yar shared in #creators that two metas have passed playtesting and so their feeder answers are now locked down and available for assignment to puzzle authors. Expect more details from him coming soon.
…and something from the end of April:
This just in: the Triumvirate has backed the proposal to replace live-operator answer callbacks with a fully-automated system. See #answer-checking for a lengthy discussion of various requirements. And although committed to this proposal, the final decision will depend on what we can actually build and deploy.
…
About puzzles: we’re on track for having slots for about 13 metas. Five metas have been finalized, 4 are in testing / revision but we’re confident they’ll be included, and 4 more are in early-stage testing but might not yet make it. But across all those metas we have a ton of feeders available for use and we've started allocating answers. Reach out to Yar or Brent or throw an idea into Puzzletron if you want to get cracking!
Some folks were designing, testing, and revising meta-puzzle ideas. Not me, though. My role here was "eagerly waiting."
Some folks were were hammering out story ideas. Not me, though. My role here was "eagerly waiting."
Some folks were brokering decisions on "contentious topics" that hadn't been easily resolved by survey. Not me, though. My role here was "eagerly waiting."
This was a slow month for me. It was busy for some folks, but slow for me.
Folks kept working on early puzzle ideas that we could "adapt" once we knew more about the story/structure we'd be fitting them into.
E.g. Doug Zongker's Zipline puzzle was ready early. I signed up as an editor on it. Doug was probably eager to get that puzzle reviewed early because he was our Tech Czar, and planned on doing most of the programming on our hunt web server. For now, with folks still discussing what our hunt rules should be, he didn't have much programming to do. But that wouldn't stay true for long.
Jan Chong signed up as editor on my RADAR puzzle (which eventually became Whirlwind). Jan knew about control symbols from RADAR control panels. If you're wondering where those weird-circle-symbols in Whirlwind came from, I didn't make them up. Jan pointed me at those.
Art Czar Nat Parisi wanted some tech help to make "map pages,"
pages like the The
Grand Castle map page:
"clickable" images on a background. But she wanted
support for overlapping animations instead of just still images.
I picked up that task, putting my newfound
<canvas>-drawing skills to good use. We didn't
even use this system; we ended up discarding it and using
something else. I don't even know why I mention it, except now
it's months later and I'm looking over old notes and files and
thinking "What did we get done in April, anyhow?"
Continued: May