Damn you m139! Your update made my message dissapear! T_T
I got puzzle 4.
Progress: 1,3,4 solved.
(emmh and I think I'm confusing now... you really should put numbers in the puzzles to know what number they are.... because what you call puzzle 3 I think I call it puzzle 4)
n-EDIT: or maybe not.. stuck on 5 (I have an initial idea for 2 but I'm doing something wrong yet)
n+1-EDIT: Ok I made a list with all the puzzles. I should have done this at first. Now I know which is the puzzle 1, 2, 3.. :D
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Sorry for that (what a time to make an update!).
I hope I didn't confuse myself with all the disorder and multi-track drifting (looks OK at the moment).
My counting order is: puzzle 1 for giveaway 2, puzzle 2 for giveaway 3 (the one everyone is stuck on), puzzle 3 for giveaway 4 (guess the movie thing) and so on.
This is weird. According to hint 4 Q2 should be easy if you have Q1.
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MEGAbump for solving P2. But I can't get pass through P3... Shame on me, usually I'm really good with movies.
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I wonder what the image search shows you (there were only a few results for me, which were valid leads to the solution), but it was found out recently, that image search results actually differ from person to person (or it might have been the ordering of search results, which will not matter in this case, as the number of results was really small).
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Inage search is not helping at all, I don't know if I'm doing something wrong but I only get some Game of Thrones images.
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Sorry it made you feel that way.
Actually, which puzzle are you speaking of? If you have solved the first one (it has quite a large number of solvers) then you should have access to 3 more (number 2, 3 and 5).
Could you share your guesses, when the GAs are over and I'll post the answers? I really want to know, what made the puzzles so confusing so that I can avoid that in future ones or actually put those things there, depending on how evil I feel.
Thank you. Good luck with the other puzzles if you don't feel too good about these ones.
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Lol Thanks for the kind words but m139 doesn't need my permission or advice to make his puzzles. And as you said, other people have solved puzzles 2 (1 out of 17 people solved it) and 5 (1 out of 5 people solved it), all of them known puzzlers, so it is not impossible. I'm still trying it myself. Most puzzle creators give great hints when they see their giveaways won't reach 5 entries so they can get the CV. m139's previous puzzle giveaways ended with 2 and 0 (weee I solved this one!) entries, so you can guess that he doesn't care it too much.
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Oh, haven't noticed that comment at first.
That's actually a good point (about the disinterst in CV being caught by players - should give it a second thought next time).
My interest is actually in the puzzles being solved, so I'm trying to find the balance between them being interesting (i.e. not obvious, presenting questions in unfamiliar ways), but not too hard (like, not giving distractions, providing multiple spelling possibilities, trying to be sort of cryptic, but precise in instructions). I'm sort of hoping that doesn't cause frustration only and actually attracts people.
But that balance is far from being found yet.
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Well, I;m trying to give some guides to the puzzles, but I'm not going to make them obvious. This is especially true, when there are solvers for the puzzle already - not that I think that "if the puzzle has whatever solvers, it can be solved by anyone", no, but I think it's rather unfair to the first "hard" solvers to provide obvious hints and diminish their chances to win (I feel sort of bad, when I win a game after many-many hints and the people who got there well before me get nothing)...
But this is not the actual reason for vague and sort of "random" hints. Scroll through the comments section. How many comments can you find, that say "Oh shit, I'm stuck with Q4 of P5" or "I definitely know, what are the actions you speak of in P2, but I'm confused with the order" - these are almost none, which means I actually don't know what exactly to give hints on. How am I supposed to help people if I don't know, what the are stuck with?!
I didn't ask for the feedback out of blue, you know.
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Still, it's good to have some feedback on actual puzzle questions. Lets one learn to make good (not "easy" ones, no) puzzles. There is pretty much always feedback from the solvers inside the GA, but I hope there'd be some from those who did attempt, but didn't make it through.
Although, now I see a few flaws in the puzzles (see update 5.5 about the image search, also I just realized, that puzzle 5 can hardly be solved unless you guess the game behind it and I haven't actually given any additional hints about that, which isn't really helpful and so on).
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You still have time to give some hints about the game of P5 :P
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P6 should be solvable by picking 4 words out of puzzle desctiption (2 words in series, unchanged, another word unchanged, and one slightly modified) - that gave me the wikipedia article for the answer as the first google search result.
That must be the easiest way to solve it
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puzzle desctiption
Is the title of the puzzle counted too?
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3 of those are me (different PCs - or even using the incognito mdoe - count as different players even if you are logged in) ^^ Not sure about the other 2 XD
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Sure, here goes:
Got P1 and P2, which were... clear enough, I think.
P3 - not a film buff, found the clue but my Google-fu failed (keep getting the planet of the apes series, heh). Saw final clue but didn't get the cave --> cove thing.
P5 - Google and steam search failed, kept looking for some sort of "universe" "Galactic" or such.
Never reached the others.
But hey, I won P2 :) Thanks for the puzzle and GAs!
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Well, I'm deliberately trying to make my puzzle google-proof (unless expecting people to actually solve those by a simple search, as P1 or P6) and this time google failed me by providing zero results at some cases and valid indirect results at other - there must be at least two ways to solve the puzzle therefore..
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I got P1, P3 & P4 really fast so no feedback on those.. P2, P5 and P6 were just really dependent on knowing/guessing which game the giveaway was for. If you didn't figure out the game, it was pretty impossible to solve them and that can be demotivating as akhanubis put it.. Also, because there's not much you can do about it..
For P2 I didn't know the game and the "questions" -2, -2 didn't really help much either ;-)
Anyway I had fun with the puzzles, and was nice to have a harder puzzle sometime! I don't agree all puzzles should be easily accesible for a lot of people and it's good if some of the hardcore puzzlers have a hard time as well :-)
Oh and I won a game so yay! :-D
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Dang, I won nothing :(
:P
Feedback:
P1: was easy by googling more then 1 question at the same time.
P2: guessed the host was you, the way your nick is written on your steam profile helped solve it with a pair of guesses (didn't get the right to left and left to right part, nor why "m" was gone).
P3: yandex search by image found this page which mentioned Stalker.
P4: Never heard of Game of Life, so just got lucky I guess XD
P5: thought it was Plantery Annihilation at first, then got stuck because i was thinking about q1 and q2 the wrong way (thought "bodypart" mean the main unit or something similar and similarly the "CPU module", figured it out after reading the wikipedia page fully).
P6: Needed the hint you gave to Starlynk. Still took a bit because I actually ignored that wikipedia entry at first, not recognizing it was a game name.
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Ah, the yandex search. Haven't used that in a while. But, I guess, you'd need to know that the movie is somehow Russian-related to use that (which wasn't obvious).
Yep, P4 was easy to bruteforce (or just make a lucky guess) - so many correct answers and so much symmetry in the question.
That hint seemed to have helped a lot (the P6 one) - a thing for me to remember for the future puzzles.
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IRL Cakeday was coming!
So, there is a train of game giveaways - nothing special, but I'd consider these games worth having in my library.
Level restriction is 1+
Every giveaway is acessible through a simple puzzle.
I tried making puzzles simple, but not trivial.
Every puzzle is related to the game it leads to.
If there will be people stuck at some puzzle I'd provide more hints or a shortcut to the next car, so that the next puzzle can be attempted.
Ranting, pleading for hints and other feedback is highly welcome
Update 1.99
It looks like almost everyone is stuck on the second puzzle, therefore I'll provide a couple of hints for that one today. The first one will be just a small one, but the second is going to be more precise. Also a shortcut to the third puzzle will be given in the second giveaway at the time second hint is provided (the puzzle difficulty is sort of random, so the 3rd might be easier, than the 2nd... may be not...).
Hint 1 (puzzle 2)
The giveaway behind the puzzle is actually not for a single game, but for a 2-game set.
Hint 2 (puzzle 2)
Of the three actions the puzzle want you to perform on a particular input one is purely arithmetical, the other two are rather string/array manipulations althought one of them can also be described as a set of mathematical operations of the input is slightly pre-processed.
(Also giveaway 2 now has a shortcut to puzzle 3.)
Hint 3 (puzzles 2, 3, 5)
There are not only the hints I've left, there also hints I didn't care to hide.
Update 2.3
Seems like it's time to add more hints. Expect them to be coming soon. Already updated hint 3.
Have you been attentive to accompanying information and looked for hints to puzzles 3 and 4 that were initially there?
List of puzzle titles and corresponding numbers now available.
And there is a first person to reach the last puzzle.
Hint 4 (puzzle 5)
Q1 and Q2 represent the same type of in-game lore, Q3 - another one and Q4 - another one. First 3 questions can be found on the wikipedia entry for the game. Q4 has a separate wikipedia page, which mentions the game (as the term used there is very specific for this particular game).
Hint 5 (puzzle 5, Q4, vague hint)
Batman!
Update 3.0
Time for more hints, I guess. This time I'll summarize thing that were given as comments in this thread, as some of the comments had mistakes in them and were accidentally misleading.
Plus added some more hints (may me obvious).
Hint 6 (all puzzles)
Only the last puzzle has a game name (non-bundle stuff) as an answer. Others can use parts of the game names or don't use game names at all.
Hint 7 (puzzle 4)
Questions in puzzle 4 have numerous possible answers. Taking the symmetry into account leads to a pretty simple bruteforcing procedure if you don't know what the puzzle is actually about.
Hint 8 (puzzle 3)
No dots necessary (although acceptable).
Update 4.0
There is less than 24 hours left before the giveaways end. A shortcut to the fifth puzzle is now open at the second giveaway.
Update 5.5
Last minute feedback leads to last minute hints.
And there is a first person to solve all of them!
As it was pointed out images search on puzzle 3 provides no meaningful results under some conditions (checked that myself from a different location), therefore, a hint/lead is provided.
Hint 9 (puzzle 5)
Q1 and Q2 can be summarized as a mathematical concept. Although you don't need to put this anywhere in the answers.
Hint 10 (puzzle 3)
"Black mixture of hydrocarbons and free carbon", "cave" (synonym, sounds similar, but not exactly), thing above you (when you are outside).
Hint 11 (puzzle 5)
1.7
Final Update
Thanks to everyone participating in the puzzle train. The giveaways have ended, the keys have been sent.
One game is left unclaimed and it goes public.
See below for puzzle answers and hints explanation.
Puzzle list
Answers
Puzzle 1
Puzzle 2
Puzzle 3
Puzzle 4
Puzzle 5
Puzzle 6
Solutions
The questions are the "Game Over" messages in "The Bridge". Googling for the first one usually results in nothing particular. Googling the second one or several of them is likely to get you here, where you can find all of them.
Please share how you got stuck with this one, so future puzzles can be improved. The way to solve the puzzle is to take the numbers in my nickname ("your host" was myself), split them in two parts (13 and 9), swap the order ("left to righ and right to left", thus 9 and 13) and do what the questions tell you to do (subtract 2 from each number). This gives you the numbers in the game names in the bundle 7 and 11.
Google search for the image usually (but not always) provides a short video about Andrei Tarkovsky. Stalker is one of his most famous movies. Additionally hint 10 says "Tar"-"cove"-"sky" and the imgur image description mentions three characters from the movie (the writer, the professor and monkey).
The figures are dynamic figures of the Game of life. Adding one additional cell (depending on position) either makes the configuration evolve into a static figure (Q1) or four figures identical to the initial one (Q2). Imgur desctiption has additional lead to the Gmae of life.
The answers are Total Annihilation (first game of the series, that led to Planetary Annihilation, AFAIK) in-game lore. Q1 and Q2 are the two in-game fractions. Q3 is the field leader of the troops, the Commander. Q4 is Nanolathe, the cool way of construction used in the game. Last-minute hint "1.7" is the in-game time of Planetary Annihilation in my Steam profile (didn't have mech time to come up with something more relevant).
The puzzle just point to the wikipedia description of the parallax effect. (googling alteration effect movement distance usually gets you tere in no time).
Also, note, that titles and descriptions in the puzzle are always highly related to the game and thus the answer.
No action here anymore!!!
Mood music
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