Happy New Year, may joy and prosperity be with you
May you be the moonlight of the day, seeking no dazzling glory, nor swept away by worldly tides.
This Year’s New-Year Game
The event has ended, the game analysis has been released, and all game resources have been archived.
As usual, it’s time for this year’s New-Year Game. A while ago I built a dedicated site for it, so I no longer have to embed code inside Typecho posts 😆.
Below is this year’s new game—much simpler than last year’s. You can obtain the key without any programming knowledge. Enjoy it~ 🎉
Analysis
First of all, thanks to big shots @电脑星人 and @FantasyLand の 暗梦 for taking the time to write walkthroughs for this game, and to 电脑星人 for pointing out an error in the provided clues. My sincere apologies to everyone who took a long detour because of that mistake!! Both articles follow the standard solution path for this puzzle.
Vinking’s 2024 New-Year Game Walkthrough – 电脑星人
Vinking’s 2024 New-Year Game Walkthrough – FantasyLand の 暗梦
One more thing: besides deducing from clue #5—"Dongfang-1 was the earliest spacecraft to use the transmission technique in this audio file; the technique allows radio transmission and reception of images"—that the second-step audio uses Slow-Scan Television (SSTV), you can also throw the audio into an audio editor (e.g., Adobe Audition), open the spectrum view (Shift + D), and you’ll see the decoding software MMSSTV used for this audio. I forgot to mention this method when chatting with 电脑星人! (I really just forgot!!
Solving via spectrogram
Game Resource Archive
All game resources have been archived, modified slightly, and redeployed to Vercel for anyone still interested in trying it.
Game Data
A total of 10 players solved the puzzle this year. The first solver finished at 10:42 on 9 Feb 2024. During the event we received 7 ratings. According to the feedback: the difficulty was set too low (average 1.28 on the difficulty item, where 3 = just right and 5 = too hard), and the flow felt a bit short (average 2.14 on length). Next year’s New-Year Game will be adjusted based on these scores.
Other Abandoned Design Ideas
While designing, I brainstormed several schemes, but after play-testing I found their learning curve too steep and not friendly to players without a coding background, so I finally chose this simpler version.
One discarded idea required players to repair a damaged QR code to obtain the key. For those unfamiliar with QR-code generation principles, it would take a lot of time to study the theory. Of course, I might still design an easy QR-repair game in the future 😎. Here’s the QR-code generation principle I read when prototyping that idea, for anyone interested.
Another idea was to present a passage made of Emoji plus an English text (or a short English story). Each Emoji maps to one English letter, and the Emoji text strictly matches the letter frequency of the English text, letting players derive the mapping and finally obtain the key.