The Emmy Award Winning 2016 Archer Scavenger Hunt
Milton Toast to Toast
After the success of the 2015 Scavenger Hunt, Mark Paterson and I, now joined by Bryan Fordney, began work on the sequel project. The 2016 Scavenger Hunt was larger in scope and complexity than the previous year. I contributed puzzles, ciphers, cryptograms, and helped refine concepts Mark implemented into the hunt. Meanwhile, I also developed another video game.
You can play Milton Toast to Toast and explore a little of the 2016 Scavenger Hunt by CLICKING HERE.
Milton Toast to Toast was developed in the Unity Engine. I designed the game to resemble 80s classic arcade racing titles like Pole Position and Outrun at first blush, but the game quickly reveals itself to be a troll. In this season of Archer, the team had moved from NYC to LA. The idea was that Milton, the toast-making robot, was left behind and was now making his way from Las Vegas to Los Angeles at his real top speed in real-time. This all sounds ridiculous, but it became an increasing challenge to create puzzles or obstacles that would delay the fans for more than a day or two.
Playing the game legitimately would appear to take the better part of a day, but in truth, Milton was programmed to break down and crash after a few hours. In the meantime, he would pass dozens of billboards, several of which contained flags. These flags were international nautical flag codes creating a key to a cipher elsewhere. I also misnamed the flag files and obfuscated the order I loaded flag positions in the code of the game so players couldn’t just learn the solution by reading the game source code or asset file names - which they immediately did and turned themselves around for days before realizing my little trick.
KRIEGER’s KASTLE
You can find instructions on how to play KRIEGER’s KASTLE by CLICKING HERE. This is a real old school MUD, so you will need to telnet in. Additionally, this is a multiplayer dungeon and requires 2-3 people to complete as designed. Some players did program macros to bypass this requirement, though.
Bryan Fordney developed an old-school multi-user dungeon or MUD. A MUD is a real-time multiplayer text adventure where players explore a dungeon but may also need to collaborate to solve puzzles in real-time. The challenge a the center of the 2016 Archer Scavenger hunt was collecting images that could be combined to create the image of a large maze. Our MUD was designed to be a section of that maze that players would have to map out and draw by hand to add to the larger puzzle.
My role on KRIEGER’s KASTLE was mainly writing flavor text for the 100+ and many items and objects located in the KASTLE.
These games, along with the collection of puzzles, cryptograms, and ciphers, were a part of won Mark, Bryan, and I each Emmy Awards for Outstanding Creative Achievement.
