IMPORTANT:

http://www.steamgifts.com/go/comment/z2v6YgM


Sorry for 2 and half months without puzzles. But today is the day! Welcome to my 10th puzzle!!

Let's see if I remember how this work....
There are 2 giveaways. The first one (bundle game) is before the puzzle. The second one (no-bundle game) is after the puzzle. Both are level1+

The link to the ITH (It's Too Hard) puzzle is in the description of the first giveaway
Please don't share answers nor links, FAIR PLAY! (^_^)/

Deadline: 4 days (time left here).
Good luck. I hope you enjoy^^


Fri, 31 Jul 2015 01:13:00 GMT: First solver! Congratulations theBlindOne!

Some stats:
   19 players found the puzzle
   24 votes in the poll
   22 entries first giveaway
   0 entries second giveaway

As always, first hint (if necessary) will be given after 24h (EDIT: Sorry, it was after more time than expected)
You decided!: Hint for solving the puzzle. You can find it in the ITH (It's Too Hard) page.


Puzzle ended.

Final stats:
   95 players found the puzzle
   7 players solved the puzzle (7.4%)
   108 votes in the poll
   113 entries first giveaway
   1 entries second giveaway

Go to the solution

9 years ago*

Comment has been collapsed.

Do you like puzzles?

View Results
Yes
No
I just like the giveaways after them
This is the magic option of the poll! If this option reaches 100 votes you will have 100 days of good luck!!

Bump for being stupid and too busy to solve it earlier.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Will there be more hints?

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

More? O.o
What kind of hint would you want to see?

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I don't even know what I'm supposed to look for. I played with Photoshop a little but found nothing. Is it about the colors? Or is the message hidden in the image somewhere?

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

The image has a size of 804 bytes. I can hardly hide nothing there.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Well then I have no idea where a message of 138 characters would be. I give up.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Bump

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

bump.cs

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Welcome from your journey, sixth solver! And congrats!

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Last hour!

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Solution:

  • Part 1 - Find the puzzle.

The link is a lie. If you run the mouse over the link you will see a valid link, but if you click on it it leads to a blank page. Look at the source code, you will see why:

<a href="http://www.itstoohard.com/puzzle/VBksJ%CE%9AE8">VBksJKE8</a>

The letter K is not a letter K, it is kappa. I used a similar trick in my first puzzle. You have just to copy the code I wrote (the text, not the link) and paste it following the ITH url format (http://www.itstoohard.com/puzzle/VBksJKE8)

  • Part 2 - Solve the puzzle

HINT 1: There is an offset
HINT 2: Message has 138 characters. Sorry, it will be a bit tedious
HINT 3: It is a bit obvious but... Focus on the picture

So... It is about the colourful picture. I said the message has 138 characters, and there are 46 tiles in the alien (Have you ever count how many pixels I am made of?). 46*3=138, so 3 characters for each colourful square.
Values for Red, Green, Blue. You can use Paint, Photoshop, color selector from developer tools in Firefox, online tools as this one... to see the colours in the image.
Extracting the colour values for each tile, you end up with 46 hexadecimal values (C8E5CC, ECCFA0, D3F4C5, E1CDE7, C9E6D4, E5D2F3, A1A0D4, E8C1EE, CBF3A0, C6EFD2, A0D0E1....)

But those numbers mean nothing :/ That is because (hint 1) there is an offset, I added a number to those values. If you substract 808080 (background color) to each value, you end up with 48654c, 6c4f20, 537445, 614d67, 496654, 655273, 212054, 68416e, 4b7320, 466f52, 205061...
Introducing those codes in xlate, for example, gives you the hidden message.
It is just a bit tedious extracting all the value colors. For substracting the offset you could use Excel, as fR0z3nS0u1 did. m139 used Matlab, mandrill used Python, Tevemadar used c#... because they know how to code. Life is easier if you know how to code.
So the hidden message was:

HeLlO StEaMgIfTeRs! ThAnKs FoR PaRtIcIpAtInG In My PuZzLe
FoRmAt Of ThE AnSwEr: md5(Answer)
QuEsTiOn: WhO CrEaTeD ThE 1st SpAcE InVaDeRs?

You can find the answer in Wikipedia and it is 'Tomohiro Nishikado'. Now you need to calculate the md5 of 'Tomohiro Nishikado'. In internet there are hundreds of webs that are willing to do that for you. For example this one. The web will say MD5 hash for Tomohiro Nishikado is : 8f94f572a4fccbc2efdae5949787f2ec, that is the answer for the puzzle.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

That's way too complex to figure out in such a short while. I cannot fathom how anyone did it without the hints.

That being said what was up with the Icelandic for "run/ leap steamgift"? Freak coincidence or dead end?

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

What Icelandic for "run/leap steamgift" ?

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

On the imagehost it said "Hlaupsg". Hlaup means leap/jump in Icelandic (based on old norse) and hlaupa for run. the SG is steamgifts of course. Got a bit side tracked by that:

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

It is a Turkish hosting. No idea what it means, but the image was 3 days hosted at imgur before... You guys overthink to amazing levels O.o

EDIT: I just remembered the picture was not uploaded by me. So maybe the person who uploaded it chose the title for that reason :\ Only he knows... It makes sense sg is for steamgifts.

9 years ago*
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Hehe well you have to go wide before you can go deep after all. I thought it had something to do with leap of faith as a term in conjunction with the Wizard of Oz and started looking for quotes. The hints at the end proved it to be a dead end, but it was too late by then.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I am not sure, but visiting the hosting page, there is "Hlaupsg", and it is identified as Icelandic by Google Translate. And while it does not translate to anything, now I see if you start removing the letters from the end, it means something 'run'.

EDIT: I have read Notional's comment

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

That is great!
Even if I had no clue, thank you very much for the puzzle, love the background subtraction :)
Done similar things a lot, when I worked in Astronomy.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

To be honest, the background substraction was improvised, since the colours were too dark for my taste xd Also had to use upper/lower cases so that the colours were more different.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I just had an idea how to copy your puzzle but make it a little bit more complicated :) Now I just have to find the time to do it and a worthy giveaway.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Fear

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I was looking at actual offsets of the png-file. Thought it was hidden in the IDAT-section.

View attached image.
9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

It seems at least you learned stuff

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

And got myself 3-4 tools for manipulating PNG files ^^ (as if I'd ever need them ;))

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Made the same mistake at first. The discussion and mentioning of "different tools" and "standard tools" and particularly the fact that images on different hosts looked differently in hex told me I'm on the wrong way.
Realized the thing 8 hours before the GA deadline.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Well, if the hexvalues were different on different sites, it would mean that the file had been altered on upload, and that could have removed/corrupted the message in the IDAT as well. So wasn't really proof of the theory being wrong. :)

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Definitely not a proof, but I didn't have a lot of support for the hypothesis either.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

So I was actually pretty close.. couldn't figure out the offset though and I worked with the RGB values instead of the hex values, but that would have worked too.. just had to substract 128 instead of all others I tried! The weird capital letters threw me off and was pretty busy at work today :-P Ah well, already have the game, but very nice challenge!!

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I'm so impressed with the SGers who solved this :D

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I'm so stupid.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Not my cup of tea, but fantastic puzzle nonetheless. Congratulations to all solvers.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Deleted

This comment was deleted 6 years ago.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Hmm. Seems the problem was that I had the completely wrong idea about what you meant by "offset". I was working on altering the colors themselves in an attempt to get something to show up instead of screwing around with their codes. Ah well.

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

I got the colorcode idea pretty quick, but couldn't figure the offset.
Before the 138 hint I dabbled around with an online piano tool for a while to see if cedeceae...etc was a song from Oz :P
It would have been nice if the whole Dorothy and Brick Road theme was kept, I wasn't expecting the space invaders to poke their big blocky heads in again ;)

9 years ago
Permalink

Comment has been collapsed.

Sign in through Steam to add a comment.