There Is Love In Me Postmortem: Part 2: Dev's (Kind Of) Furry Porno Game

「Recreating the entirety of my game design for the viewing pleasure of my nascent audience!」

After the prior article attempted to justify why a video game made for a video game jam did not have either a video component or a game component, I knew there was something missing from my gargantuanly loquacious Part 1: a Part 2. Which was implied, honestly. Join me on this increasingly accurately named duology of articles, so that you may gain some insight into my twisted mind, and also hear my justifications on why spending 3,000 hours on RuneScape was a worthy endeavour. No, I haven't maxed.

The Game

I made There Is Love In Me for a game jam. That implies a game portion is necessary. According to the rules of Strawberry Jam 8, "Any kind of game is okay! It doesn't even have to be a video game — if it involves any kind of interaction whatsoever, that's fine." Now, I could put on my Long Form Video Essayist hat and make torturous definitions as to what a "game" is, and maybe make a brief detour to the definition of "fun." (The greatest development tip I ever heard was to stop watching game design YouTube.) I could say that a PDF is interactive, and the goal is to read until the very end, at which point you level up by being exposed to human culture. That would be amusing, for the two seconds it'd take to get canned by the admin and waste three weeks of my life.

But in honest truth, I had no idea what I was doing for the game portion. My brilliant plan to write a novel and learn a new engine and a new programming language and set up my Krita keybinds for the fifth time because Wacom tablet support is still a clusterfuck after all these years... wasn't a viable strategy. So I didn't have an engine, or graphics, or a design, or any programming environment at all, and this was three days before the deadline. You might say I was a wee bit fucked. But I'm a wiley possum. Never underestimate an alienated youth to bullshit their way out of labour.

Hard times make hard men, and so does robophilia. I had a secret weapon: years of experience with awful adventure games. I didn't need to make a video game after all. All I had to do was shove some puzzles in front the player, make them solve them in order to read each chapter, and then call it a skill issue when they don't understand your enlightened train of thought based on an untranslatable pun. I already had the chapters separated in my notes app, so if I just put them into text files, password-protect them, and then associate each one with a puzzle, that'll be a design all to itself. Simple to implement, thematically appropriate, and more interesting than the default Twine skin.

A lot of people assume archetypal ideas of what a "video game" is. They're exposed to the culture they inhabit, which is entirely corporatized and cyclical, based on trend-chasing money grubbing rather than any aspirations to evolve the medium. Indie games are not immune to this, seeing as the most successful game of 2024 stole, well, everything. (PALWORLD Plagiarism Tier list.) Even in cast-aside subcultures, such as video games based around slampigging cute and magical furry critters, these archetypal ideas are everywhere. It's rare to see something crazy and unique come out, and it's that type of iconoclasty - that search to expand the boundaries of what was prior thought possible - that defines much of my work. Why be third-rate in a race to the bottom when you can be the victor in a party of one?

The best game design resource I've found is the book "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses". It emphasizes that games aren't just the culture we're exposed to, and that we must take inspiration from all mediums, all aspects of our lives, in order to create great designs. If you feel the need to fit your design into a particular mould, whether consciously or unconsciously, that's a sign you need more experience. And that includes the technologies presented to you, thinking that you have to use this engine or that art style in order to qualify yourself as a "real" developer, or a "real" designed. You can make a design without tech, but you can't use tech without a design. That's how we got RuneScape 3.

You need to get out of the cycle of desperation and start enjoying things outside what is presented to you, both with other arts and with aspects of your life that can't be easily captured in a medium. Yes, you can find brilliance by iterating on known designs, but doing the obvious thing will always mean you're living in the shadow of giants. "Pizza Tower" is a brilliant game, taking influences from all over the place, aesthetically and programmatically. But even it's Steam description says it's "inspired by the Wario Land series." To say nothing of Stardew Valley, Axiom Verge, or Bug Fables, all of which wear their influences so blatantly that you're always interpreting them as designs-by-proxy of a greater good. That's all you're ever going to be - an "inspired by," profiteering off a stranger's dream.

I was one of the few games in Strawberry Jam to not use a computer engine to make the game functional. Of course, sidestepping the quadruple-A dick-measuring contest of "my engine is bigger than yours" doesn't absolve you from good practices. You have to make sure the game works, that it's free of bugs, that the solutions make sense, that it doesn't behave unexpectedly on your target platforms, and that you didn't stumble across a hidden 260 character file path limitation that curiously affects one operating system as opposed to every other on the planet. Cross-platform testing should be easy, since there is literally no engine, right? Haha. Yeah. Cross-platform. We'll get to that. Fuck Microsoft. Who said that?

Crappy Puzzles And You!

Let's talk about crappy puzzles. For the purposes of this article, a "crappy puzzle" will be anything that is uninspired, embarassingly easy, mind-bendingly unfair, or was ever featured in a triple-A action-adventure game. One would think that the stench of terrible puzzle designs, aged over decades of experience of entire genres rising and falling, would have necessitated a courtesy flush. Our civilization would be better off had we never discovered the lost art of lame hacking minigames. But the sins of the father permeate us all, so I must absolve you...

Sometimes designers will include a stock video game puzzle as the introduction to their game. They believe that the uniqueness and intrigue of their design is inferior, and so they have to dumb down their introduction for the sake of those who haven't flipped through back copies of Nat Geo Kids. This can be justifiable in something like a Professor Layton game, where you need to introduce the interface of the game, the hint system, the characters, and so on. In that case, it's just a "sanity check" to advertise what the game is about.

But when your systems are immediately intuitive, it's not necessary to betray your design. Some people call this "accessibility". Do not believe their lies. Accessibility is a buzzword for throwing in yet another generic video game puzzle you've seen a million times before. The world does not need another sliding block puzzle that reveals a match-three passcode to a two-keyed lock that requires a game of Mastermind to get to the forest that marks the right entrance with one guard who always lies and another that demands 100 coins and his name spelled backwards to pass.

The first puzzle you throw at the player sets the tone of the rest of the game. Setting the tone with Simon Says is worse than a brown note. I chose not to use crappy puzzles, and Todd Howard didn't stalk me with a power fist. In fact, I parodied sliding puzzles with a deliberately awful one that is trivial if you just right click on something. Even when I pulled out ol' reliable St. Ives, I put a twist on it, with a wink to the people who recognized that medieval bullshit. We have the power to break these habits.

People. I cannot tell you the pity I felt when I picked up Old School Runescape, a game with a lineage of hundreds of innovative, lore-intensive, subversive, and brain-bending quests to go through, and saw that one of the noob quests was, in order, a pipes puzzle, a jug puzzle, a logical positioning puzzle, and those three towers which bring up painful memories of every programmer's introduction to algorithms class.

All this was done to retrieve an old hammer from a glass case in a three-floor tower a brisk jog away from town. One wonders why they didn't send a high schooler to sort it out. And this isn't even the only jug puzzle in the game. They ripped off Fremennik Trials! How absolutely massive your cannonballs must be to not only rip off your own shit, but to rip off one of the most iconic and beloved quests in the entire game! Holy. Fuck.

That's the problem with a crappy puzzle. It degrades yourself by limiting your imagination, and it degrades your player by insulting their pattern recognition abilities. If you're an obscure indie dev who is looking towards an online possum for game design advice, then your audience is the type to seek out games like yours, right? With that being the case, it makes sense that they've sought out lots of other games like yours. They've been around the block. You can't jingle keys in front of them, because they aren't infants anymore, and they've seen that shit before.

Of course, you can also go too far in the other direction. If your game isn't about puzzles, and you throw in a crazy, unexpected puzzle at them that has nothing to do with your other systems, you can expect a lot of rage quits and Reddit posts. And if your game is about puzzles, you still need to have some sort of sensible, discoverable internal logic for it to work - preferably designed to be solved by someone besides the developer and their mom. ("Far, far too many moon logic puzzles are based on puns.") Not saying I got this 100% with There Is Love In Me, but at least I knew where the jank was. And besides, all game jam puzzles are kind of crappy. Cut me some slack.

How do you avoid crappy puzzles? First step: know your enemy. Read everything in the Stock Puzzle TV Tropes page. Read the subpages. Read the examples. This stuff is pure gold. And they're not all bad, but you gotta know the rules before you can realize why they're good. Especially if you plan to break them. For extra credit, search up "worst video game puzzles". This is a lot of fun - especially on rant blogs. It's not enough to know, analytically, why a puzzle sucks. You have to feel the pain.

And the second step, of course, is having fun. Or writing out thousands of words on your obscure internet blog instead of making more video games. That works, too.

How Does ARG Werk

The best way to talk about puzzle design is to show off the design of the puzzles. There Is Love In Me has 14 passwords and 24 stated solutions - as well as several unintentional solutions, which you will surely stumble across. The puzzles range from trivial to batshit, paced roughly in order of an English class exposition-denouement thingy. To my knowledge, nobody has successfully finished the game, or written a 3 hour YouTube essay on it.

Everyone who tried the work, and lived to tell the tale, told me that they gave up around the fourth or fifth puzzle, meaning they had to read the spoilers file, or the PDF version. First of all, you're welcome. I could have easily been a Real Gamer who would refuse to show you the sex scenes until you solved my riddles three, like a graven image of The Guy Game.

Second of all, even among my peers who were quite competent in puzzle games, there was something about the technological skills and lateral thinking required that hard filtered them even in the earliest stages. Even puzzles with multiple solutions, which would be familiar to any ARG gamer, ended up a task. Even Mr. Marker Man was filtered by nearly every puzzle, and this is someone who actually knows how to computer. I expected everyone to get filtered by 008: Aleph Antiphon, which is a total bitch, and deliberately so. Not so much by the other puzzles. You'll find out why, once I get to them...

As I stated in my last article, all creative works come from existing inspirations. You will be shocked to know that I'm used to this type of puzzle design, and the sources will also shock you, and even more shocking was the early age I was shocked at! But the main thing that inspired me to pull off this blatant cop-out puzzles-as-game design was another Strawberry Jam title, called "Find the badly drawn furry porn".

The author made a bunch of folders in a file directory, with a maze-like system of dead ends and misdirections, all for the sake of finding a piece of badly drawn furry porn. So, fuck it. If they could make a file directory game, so could I. It continually amazes me how I find inspiration in these most obscure corners, and how even a humble project can have ramifications that extend throughout space and time. And my boner.

The puzzle design is inspired by ARG and CTF competitions, which have been with me since an early age. The primary structure of these puzzles is that you have to uncover some obscure information through technological measures, and then input that into a form to validate your success. In the case of There Is Love In Me, the validation comes from finding a password to unlock ZIP files, as demonstrated by the very first password in the game being straight up told to you, if you bothered to RTFM. And my discovery of this style of puzzle design comes from a place you wouldn't expect.

As a kid, I always liked to read up on my Neopets lore, and that included all the site events that I could never go back and play. I'm so old that I'm getting nostalgic for things I was too old to experience. Neopets was known for its "plots," which were combinations of puzzles, adventures, and battles that users could only experience for a brief window in time. Even if you could play those plots now, like with Toontown Online and Club Penguin events, it wouldn't be the same. It's not an "event" if you can go back at any time. As with all community-wide celebrations... you had to be there.

The first plot which really made me go "holy shit" was called "Neopet Version 2" (spoilers for a 23 year old puzzle that you can't even access.) It demonstrated many staples of the ARG "puzzlehunt" genre, years before it was popularized in the mainstream. (It was likely inspired by "The Beast," released earlier that year.) It blew my mind to realize you could put an image into MS Paint, and then get a different image from it. Holy crap! And get this - you have to visit secret URLs on Neopets! Why hasn't anyone ever thought of this before?

Nowadays this primitive chicanery would make you roll your eyes while waiting for the MD5 hash of a phone number that tells you to input the CRC32 of a one-time pad buried at dead drop site somewhere in Antarctica, but back in 2001, that shit was the goddamn Voynich Manuscript. Everyone needs to start somewhere, and back when I was a little baby, having fourth-wall breaking puzzles of that nature was so brilliant to me that it stuck with me for the rest of my life, bringing forth a lifelong appreciation for completely bullshit, fridge brilliant puzzles.

Also for sexy as fuck furry babes. Real Neopets OGs remember Tale of Woe, and rumours of a secret erotic website featuring nude pics of Sophie the Swamp Witch, because that Ixi can SUCK. ME. DRY. HOLY FUCK.

Testing, testing

Once you have birthed your creative masterpiece, it's prudent to make sure the puzzles make sense. To others, I mean, and not just the machine elves inside your head. If you watch someone try to play a video game you're familiar with, you have to resist the urge to grab them by the shoulders and shake the stupid out of them. But they can't help themselves. The noob is an innocent little baby, untainted by the realities of the world. You are the experienced daddy, and you need to spank some sense into them. With good design. Consensually.

There's this great video series where a casual RuneScaper tries to complete every quest in the game without using external resources, such as Tip.It, RuneHQ, or Sal's Realm. For modern Scapers, who hold down spacebar with one hand while giving handjobs to Quest Helper with the other, this more difficult than solving Cicada 3301 while discovering the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. But back in the day, we didn't have the OSRS Wiki and quest guide YouTubers who forget to bring their spade. All we had was Varrock west bank, a fistful of lobsters, and a dream.

One of the longest grinds in the series is when he attempts to find a plank for Dragon Slayer. Now, this quest was released in 2001, and by the standards of that era's puzzle design, Dragon Slayer was basically the Return of the Obra Motherfucking Dinn. (I will also accept Braid or Fez, if you have ever unironically worn a fedora.) But if you were stuck in 2001 and you didn't have the Wiki, or YouTube, or a computer that could open both Netscape and RuneScape without chugging harder than Cyberpunk on the PS4, then there was no way you were finding out where that plank was.

You had to do what you had to do. And in this case, it was wandering the entire F2P world searching for a random spawn in the middle of bumfuck nowhere that's also a PvP zone and which is thematically and narratively unrelated to both this quest and every other quest in the entire game. The entire graveyard is dead content and it only exists as a remnant of the Gower Brothers sipping on that British brew. (For some reason, the most evil puzzle designers are British. Must be all that Nazi codebreaking.)

So, you should probably make someone play your game beforehand. So they don't spend an hour looking for a single plank spawn. So they can enjoy the rest of your game instead of being frustrated with a bullshit design element. So they can go back to their eight-hour shift of AFK fishing. So they can get a cool cape. Makes them feel big.

Enter Mr. Marker Man. He is a professional Computer User, an accomplished game designer, a devoted artist, an amateur mathematician, and is employed. Most importantly, he was the only person who was available to try my game. (Also, I had to cut out the porn.) Despite all his accomplishments, he is most famous for his Marker Man Adventures Speedrun (1:23:05) - which is a terrible game, mind you.

This is no mere gimmick. He is a devoted student of Marker Man Adventures. He was written a seven, I mean ten, I mean thirteen part series on this video game, hosted on his very own website. Including hand-drawn maps. For every single level. It is 24,000 words long. All this for a shovelware DS game that doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. It is like you are viewing a masterpiece of neoclassical sculpture, except made of the builder's dead skin and nail clippings. You are in front of something you know is astonishing, but in no way you can ever hope to understand.

In his own words, Mr. Marker Man describes the game as such: "A riveting story between a stick figure and his dog begins when you start a new game. Some may call it captivating, inspiring, and even spontaneous. I prefer 'confusing'. The stick figure person plays fetch with its dog and throws a ball to the right. The dog chases the ball. The dog doesn't come back. The stick figure goes to find the dog. That's the story. If the player has to go through over a hundred levels before probably finding the dog, that stick figure has a throwing arm that puts the best baseball pitchers to shame. Anyways, I hope that story was enough to make you want to sit through all of this."

For his expertise, I knew he was the best candidate to playtest my furry smut puzzle game web novel. Rest assured he has been given ample credit in the bottom of my acknowledgements.txt file, including a link to the aforementioned speedrun, which currently has 2,193 views and a description of "Why did I do this". I am grateful for his contributions to this project, and for instilling the fear of God into me, so that I may become a born again apostle of the Church of Marker Man.

The Three Day Itch

The structure of the puzzles follows a typical bell curve difficulty of easy to difficult, trailing off into "easier" once again at the end, so as to maintain narrative momentum. While I can't predict with certainty what each player will find difficult, I can predict objective measures such as complexity, multiplicity of solutions, and leaps of logic required. To put it in simple terms, the more stuff that's going on, the more stuff you have to discern between, and the less obvious the stuff is to find, the harder the puzzle.

That's why you can solve an alphabet cipher in an instant, once you recognize the cipher used. But if you invent your own cipher, that can get very difficult, very fast. That's why it's so bad to use stock puzzles if you're not just doing a tutorial segment. Part of a puzzle is recognizing that a puzzle exists, that there are logical elements to it, and that they can be manipulated in a deterministic, yet satisfying way to achieve an objective conclusion. Using a stock puzzle is just boring, because it violates the user's ability to feel clever.

There's an Extra Punctuation video about this, saying that, in adventure games especially, puzzles must be just obtuse enough to be interesting, but not so obtuse that solving it is based on luck. They should also avoid "lock and key" puzzles, where the solution is to use one object on another object, with little insight or exploration required by the player. And you can't chain together locks and keys in a Rube Goldberg machine, because that's just dragging on the initial level of suck. Ceave Gaming has a great video chaining together Mario Maker elements to bring forth puzzle design principles. It doesn't matter what medium you work in. Good puzzles are good no matter where you're using them.

Keeping in mind these design techniques, I'm able to create sophisticated puzzles with logical elements, often featuring multiple routes to get to the same solution. In addition, writing out a spoiler file detailing the steps to get to the solution helps act as an anti-evil-game-dev technique, where following your own instructions, step-by-step, helps you see where your puzzles are just unfair. There is always a fine line to cross between brilliance and bullshit, and the more risks you take, the more potential for brilliance, but the more of your audience you alienate. Personally, I would rather have the puzzles be harder and become notorious than to have them easier and born unremarkable. Also, it helps the replay value. Not my ass playing Portal for the fourth time...

I'll take a look at each puzzle in There Is Love In Me, seeing the purposes for their design, whether I succeeded at these designs, and if I should plead the insanity defense for the crime of making a puzzle that only a lunatic could solve. Some of them I am proud of, some of them I am ashamed of, and all of them I had to watch the top Marker Man Adventures speedrunner struggle through for several hours while I stared on in pity as he attempted to hilariously overthink yet another batshit solution when all he had to do was right click on something. Also, his text editor, Sublime Text, only supports 78 character wrapping or 80 character wrapping - not 79. Ya'll not rockin' with PEP 8!?

Just as a clarification, the naming system for the puzzles are a bit confusing. The spoiler file names them by the name of the folder the puzzles are in, which are usually the chapter names. The chapter names also count by zero, which means the count is unituitive. As there are multiple solutions for many puzzles, the exact number of "solutions" in the game differs, but there are objectively only 14 passwords. I will simply use the names written in the spoiler file, which are in the intended solving order.

If you want to follow along, download There Is Love In Me by Disposable Devin for FREE on Itch.io - an erotic puzzle game novelette, featuring 13 chapters of increasingly fiendish computer-knowledge based puzzles. The gameplay consists of cracking passwords in the Alternate Reality Game and Capture the Flag traditions, appealing heavily to those with an eye for lateral thinking. Taking place entirely within your file browser, the game can be solved using only a terminal and your wits. Available for Linux and Windows. Copyright 2024 Disposable Dev, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Inputs mouse and keyboard, language English.

Puzzle 1: There Is Love In Me

Also, if you somehow slammed your keyboard to this exact section of the webpage without reading that this article is a deconstruction of my own game design, beware that there are spoilers abound. If you don't want to ruin the experience, play the game and write a TV Tropes article about it. Putting a spoiler warning on my own shit gives me a gigaboner, and now I know how it feels to be a real game dev, earning such a great reward of bloodrush to the crotch. Money would be nice, but being poor makes you more creative.

This first puzzle is barely a spoiler, anyway. You have to read the README.txt file, and at the bottom, it tells you the password. This does two things: acts as a sanity check to make sure your environment properly supports passworded ZIP files, and gives you an indication that, just maybe, this highly technical, deliberately nerdy, and 18,000 word puzzle game will require you to read a few more words than you're used to. I had the courtesy of placing it at the end of the README, for those spacebar warriors who skip every line of dialogue and are confused why your character is using Korasi's on a level-1 frog.

Puzzle 2: Init

The first real puzzle of the game, which is incredibly easy. A text file says that the password is "completely insecure, by design." A non-technical user might take the leap of logic that the worst password you could use is also the most obvious, but the point isn't to solve the puzzle. The point is to act as a calling card for the rest of the game, exposing the viewer to the type of puzzles they'll expect. It's explicitly one of those "nerdy" games, as described on the itch.io page, and stated through the well-decorated README. For those who are computer touchers, this puzzle will be solved in an instant. For those who aren't, there's always Fortnite.

The text file also clarifies "All lowercase, alphanumeric, no special symbols." (that means a-z and 0-9.) This rule is omnipresent throughout the entire game, but Mr. Marker Man violated this multiple times, failing to internalize the password requirements and inputting lots and lots of passwords that violated this rule. This means that several puzzles were unecessarily difficult due to him deriving impossible solutions, which would have been handy had he kept this in mind. Also if he's reading this and is ashamed of me roasting him multiple times this article, don't worry, because I explicitly called him out in every single copy of the game!

Puzzle 3: Experimental Abstract

This puzzle is also very easy if you have half a mind about computers. The ZIP file is named "first-ones-free," which is an indicator that everything after this will be a "real" puzzle. The comments.txt file straight up tells you what to do: decode a serial code (Aleph's designation, ODAz-MjMx-ALEPH), removing the hyphen in the middle using Base64. This is also a bit of lore, saying that the creatures are called "Taigasaurs," and that their creators are heavily implied to be "Plainsapes." (It is implied in the story that Plainsapes are still alive, especially regarding "monkeys that give good dick," which suggests a cooling of genocidal relations.)

So, this puzzle introduces what to expect in the work. A lot of codebreaking, a lot of file encoding schemes, a lot of sci-fi stuff, and a new chapter to read for every single puzzle. Since the serial number designation is at the top of the novel chapter, this is a big sign that you should read the chapters alongside the puzzles, and not just ignore them. Otherwise, you will miss out on critical information - including information that exists only in your head, and which leads you to horrors of your own creation.

Also, fun fact about Aleph and Nepenthe's serial numbers. Decoded, their serial designations link to associated e621.net posts: 803231 for Aleph, and 805762 for Nepenthe. Aleph's post links to a homosexual blowie joey between two not-gay dragons from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, where Fizzle sucks off a sleeping Spike under sussy circumstances. As a teenager, this was one of the first images that made me realize I was gay as fuck, and I admit that Fizzle was my first scalie waifu, even tho he was kinda ugly in the show?? wtf???

Nepenthe's post links to a sexy body pillow picture of Nepeta Leijon, which was also an image I significantly enjoyed, as Nepeta is my AUTISTIC BIGENDER KITTY CAT WAIFU FURREVAR!!! You can tell there's a naming pun here, where Aleph points to one of the "firsts" of my furry sex life, and is named after the first letter of various writing systems. Nepenthe was named after a mythical "drug of forgetfulness," similar to how Nepenthe wants to forget her sorrows. The etymology is different from Nepeta Leijon, who is named after the Latin word for catnip, but it's an amusing similarity. Both Aleph and Nepenthe were stolen from esoteric SCP classes, where I scrolled down the list and plucked names that looked cool.

Except, for some reason, Aleph's decoded number is wrong - it was intended to be 807231, instead of the incorrect 803231. Notice the 3rd number should be 7, not 3. The password still works, but the easter egg is broken. The incorrect number instead leads to a random tentacle fuck titty demon animation - created by Mike Inel of all people, most famous for the cutscenes in Katawa Shoujo, and porn. I'll be sure to retcon this in future releases, as the world needs to see the gay dragon porn which destroyed my heterosexuality.

Puzzle 4: Aleph Abode

The first puzzle of the game that requires a bit of tinkering to figure out, this one features an ASCII art piece of the above plushie kitty. The gimmick is that there are only 8 symbols in the piece, and by removing them all, you get to see the letters in the picture that make up the password. This is also the plushie's nickname, who is properly named Intigger, of the fictional-in-universe Felinaut species. There is a bit of a contradiction as Intigger is consistently referred to as "big" in the canon, while the image is clearly smol. The explanation is simple: a space wizard did it.

I thought this puzzle would be simple given how you can solve it by using find and replace. Or, you know, your eyes. A player in my comments thought it was formatted in an encoded Brainfuck format, which is an esoteric language apt for trickery like this. Excellent idea, but a bit much for chapter 001, eh? I'll pinch that for the sequel. Mr. Marker Man also had trouble with the puzzle, not noticing that the first real puzzle probably doesn't require you to transcode 8 different symbols into ASCII-to-binary strings and then run them through different character encoding sets - but do go easy on him, he has Nerd Snipe Syndrome.

Eventually, Mr. Marker Man pulled out some bullshit alphanumeric regex magic to get all the non-symbolic characters, and thus the password. I had to admit that did make him, in the moment, a bigger gamer than me. Sublime Editor: 1, PEP 8: nil.

Puzzle 5: Nepenthe Arrives

The same as Nepenthe is introduced in the story, she is introduced in the game as mucking around with puzzle designs inside Aleph's files. (Whether this is in Aleph's computer or in their brain, I leave to the reader.) This is an introduction to multi-solution puzzles, with an awful tiling puzzle that would require you to manually arrange 64 images in a separate program. You're not supposed to do this at all - I made it so obviously bad, and hinted as such in the instructions, that nobody is supposed to take it seriously. Instead, you are supposed to find the one invalid image, and extract base64 image data from it to find the password represented in that image - which, itself, has been split up into 63 other images.

Applying automatic 79 character wrapping to every text-based file in the game ended up breaking this puzzle somewhat. Opening it as HTML off the bat, without making the img tag all on one line, will mean it fails to render in Firefox or Chrome. I accidentally made it harder than it needed to be, but if you can open it in a text file anyway, you should be able to figure out the rest. Accidental overtuning of a tutorial mechanic, hooray!

There is a non-image based solution, and that is within the filename of the invalid image. 5v67r4c78o8ol976.png looks like every other randomly generated 16-character filename in that folder. But this is a puzzle game - random is rarely random. Remember all those times on MSN Messenger that your friends would blow your mind with this cool new tech of replacing letters with numbers? It seems a little 1337, to me. Return to the language of the old gods, and you'll find the filename quite meaningful. Oh, hell yes. This is some real h4x0r shizz.

Why those numbers? Well, Nepenthe was born in 1976, which the Taigasaurs cleverly named the "8080 Advent," after the legendary microprocessor. It's all connected, maaaan. Also, if you've been following the story lore, you may notice that Nepenthe and Aleph are physically way older than their carefree personalities suggest - a typical trope of fantasy biology. But this means it doesn't make any sense for them to be extremely advanced artificial weapons and have exactly the same timeline as all the major developments of primitive computer technology that coincidentally matches our world exactly. Remember what I said about IMAGES? It's magic, ain't gotta explain - holy shit did anyone see that space wizard?

Puzzle 6: Experiment Addendum

At this point, we get into the more obscure reaches of furry depravity, by stretching the limits of human imagination, for the noble purpose of getting halfway through a softcore porn novelette. The three solutions here offer introductions to more lateral thinking and inferring information. But there are no obviously terrible paths to take - only unobviously terrible.

The most immediate puzzle is noticing the suspiciously QR-code shaped blob, tucked away in "alpha.txt". Unlike most other text based files, this one isn't word wrapped - it's all in one line, if you don't have word wrap enabled. If you do, then you have to find out the right line breaks to decode the lines code at - every 79 characters - which will create a viable image that can be scanned, whether by cell phone or by website.

I found out that Mr. Marker Man, who is good at computers, did not have word wrap enabled on Sublime Text, and I had to teach him about such a function. In addition, I had to show him to enable character wrap limits in his text editor. It is to our horror that we learned that Sublime Text supports 78 characters, or 80 characters, but not 79. There was no option for custom values in the GUI, which is such a bizarre omission that I'm wondering if the people making this software had ever imagined being at computers.

Even if you knew what you were doing, the idea of the solution being a 79 character wrap, instead of the standard 80 or 120, would require a leap of logic that isn't immediately obvious. Why 79 characters, instead of the standard 80? Because an 80 character Emacs window wraps at 79. Duh! Sublime Text: 1, PEP 8: coming out of the rafters with a steel chair.

Of course that's just the first solution. There are two more to find. There is a file named - and this will be hell on Firefox's line break algorithm - "uunnnnngggggggghhhhhhhhh.txt", which explicitly has a carriage return every 79 characters, no matter your word wrap settings, even within lines. This acts as a hint as to what you need to do with the QR code line. In addition, given what we know about filenames, you can imagine that this one gives a big hint as to what the password might be...

The real bitch of the thing is in "omega.txt". This one is a poem, and putting it here won't give you the password unless you have all the necessary information. So I'm going to let you read it, and focus on what the hell I was smoking:

If we should find ourselves synchronous
not mutually inoperative
Then I will search out arithmetic
or forfeit my private crypt
For this PIN is quite exclusive
and digitally encoded
Else our numbers will be decimated,
    serialized, bit by bit.

The spoiler file for this puzzle is a thing to behold, so I'll save that for anyone interested enough to download the game. The key insight is that all of the first words matter, and the three empty spaces at the bottom are deliberate. In addition, you will need information from prior chapters in order to successfully utilize this poem - if you even know what the instructions are telling you to do. There is a hint, of course, in that it says "PIN" instead of password. Exact words matter, here.

I freely admit this is one of the most bullshit puzzles in the game. I put it in here to make you feel clever for solving it, even though there were two much easier solutions right in front of you. It's a little bonus, totally optional, for the real puzzlers out there. I like games that let you be a little lazy, but reward you for doing something clever, going above and beyond the call of duty. I believe there's a video game series based on that phrase, called Battlefield.

Puzzle 7: Segfault Attempt

There are two solutions here: one that is a simple trick, and another that is evil. The evil one was meant to be the only puzzle in this section. I wanted to create an appreciable bump in complexity, to create a satisfying difficulty curve. I quickly realized that it was less of a bump and more like an inflation fetishist's anatomically implausible belly, meaning I had to deflate those pool toy dreams. So I'll demonstrate the easy one first, and then you can see what you're rocking with for the second one.

The first one is a little obtuse if you don't know what you're looking at. Mr. Marker Man had no clue what he was looking at, and after ten minutes of futilely playing with ASCII codes and trying to make a graph in LibreOffice, I nudged that he might have to look at things at things from a different perspective. So he abandoned the diagram and instead spent the next hour working on the evil puzzle, in the most convoluted trail of logic I had seen from a human being since a child predator cheated at Minecraft.

I eventually told Mr. Marker Man to read the spoiler file, and after many attempts at starting, and stopping, and failing to understand the logic, I eventually explained the puzzle to him. Eventually I straight up told him the password, and even then, still took several minutes to try and understand the logic, both from the evil puzzle and the sane puzzle. This unironically took over an hour. Sublime Text: 1, PEP 8: 1, Aleph's Epic 1337 h4x0r Diagram: 1.

So, what got him filtered so hard? A male USB-A pinout. Translate the numbers to octal, put them in the correct order, convert them to ASCII, and you get the password. The key insight in this puzzle was in recognizing that this was a pinout, and that the diagram represented what it represents. (Go easy on Aleph, they're only 55.) I even thought this puzzle was too easy, and wanted to expand upon it with iterative pinouts, such as PS/2, S-Video, and Ethernet. As it happened I ran out of time to go back and change it. Yet, somehow, I don't feel like I'm wanting for difficulty...

That's the easy puzzle. What about the hard one? It takes the form of a text file titled "budget.csv". The first step of the puzzle is recognizing the file extension - it's a comma-separated values file. Or, in other words, a spreadsheet. Importing this into some software, like LibreOffice Calc, allows you to more effectively manipulate and sort the data. From here, you see three columns: the first one with base64 values, the second with pinouts for an unnamed hardware standard, and the third with a bunch of seemingly-random numbers. At the bottom of each column are three hints detailing what you must do with the data to derive the solution.

The columns must be sorted, and the first two columns allow you to do so, in order to derive the correct order of the third. There are two ways of going about this. The first is to decode the first row of base64 values, geting numbers such as "100, 200, 300". This alows sorting them in order, aside from the values "010" and "020". This suggests you have to delete redundant zeroes to get correct values - a hint for a later part.

The second way is to recognize that the second column is a list of pins for the DVI-I female Dual Link standard - absent the analogue data, for simplicity. Sorting them in pin order also gives you the correct order for the third column, which can be verified by the Base64 information in the first column. Pinouts for this standard can be found anywhere, but the easiest source is Wikipedia's infobox. These puzzles do require external information, but somehow I doubt the pinout for decades old standards shipped on hundreds of millions of devices are going to anomalously change.

Mr. Marker Man searched up "TMDS pinout" on Google Images and found random images, predominantly related to the HDMI standard - which also uses TMDS technology. (Transition-minimized differential signaling, for the nerds.) Mr. Marker Man did not realize that HDMI uses 19 pins instead of 24, and so his efforts to divine the data was futile. He claimed that he didn't have experience in computer hardware, which is true, since his desktop is a Steam Deck. Yes, really. But this part of the puzzle shouldn't be too hard for people who can search up terminology and use observational skills, I say, knowing that it is casually whooping asses beyond my comprehension.

Once you have verified two different objective data sheets, the third column falls into place. You can guess the dollar signs are irrelevant, so you can take them out. The hint also suggests to "zero out my budget," which means, as implied by the base64 values previously, to remove all the zeros.

This is the first shitty part of the puzzle design, because if you remove ALL zeros in the first column, then you have two rows in the first column with repeating data: 1 and 2. You're supposed to keep in the 10 and 20 rows, and therefore add back those zeros. This is a contradiction, but a minor one, and hopefully will not lead to a "what were they THINKING" moment and a Steam community post with a dozen clown awards.

But wait, it gets worse! Now that you have a list of 24 numbers, including multiple repeating numbers, what are you supposed do with them? Input them all in order as the password? Nope. Put them in a decimal converter? Nope. Combine them together as a single string and do something with that, somehow? Nope.

Here's what you're supposed to do: separate each list of numbers, in order, into four groups of six. Add together the numbers in each group to make a single value for each one. You should have four three-digit numbers. At this point, you should be able to recognize that they are octal values. Then, just convert those octals into ASCII text, and you'll have the password.

So, just intuit something that no sane person should ever have to, and then discover another thing based on randomly putting values into converters! Also, I forgot to put in one step of the solution into the spoiler file, meaning that, even if you follow the instructions step-by-step, you'll still get the wrong value in the end! And by the way, I made multiple mistakes on the mathematics on my spreadsheet, so that even if you follow the internal logic of the puzzle - including numerous other logics that are plausible - it's still impossible to complete the puzzle unless you guess the password by complete luck!

This is incredibly fucked up and evil and I am sorry for inflicting this horror upon the world.

Puzzle 8: Segfault Aftermath

The last section actually fucked me. It fucked my shit up. My shit status? You wouldn't believe it, but it's fucked.

The good news is that this puzzle is much easier, both conceptually and otherwise. The same as the "aftermath" segments are a narrative cooldown from the prior events, I tried to make the aftermath puzzles less intensive than the prior ones. Idealistic linear pacing of difficulty is only good in theory. In practice, it gets predictable. You only feel pleasure if there's friction, and little bumps along the way are great for stimulation. Like a sex toy. To cum inside.

The two puzzles are in two text files. One is a basic file manipulation trick, and another is a variation of a stock riddle. "even-numbers-have-feelings.txt" is quite easy. As usual, Mr. Marker Man hilariously overcomplicated things - but jokes on him, this one is actually solvable! You just have to delete every odd-numbered line - counting from 1, because that's what xed, my text editor, counts at. You then only need to highlight every 0, and the password will be revealed. Actually, you don't even need to delete anything, as just highlighting something is super obvious. Except for Mr. Marker Man, who did this multiple times, including deleting lines, and didn't find it. Sublime Text: 1, PEP 8: 1, Aleph: 1, xed: 1, One: 0, Zero: 1.

The second puzzle is also simple. "odd-fellows-make-friends.txt" is that old St. Ives riddle you've probably heard from an estranged family relative trying to make amends with the younglings at a gathering before being exiled for yet another DUI conviction. It's a poem with a similar structure, but this one drops some Lore on you, taking you from "Whitehorse to Bergen," suggesting the intercontinental reach of Taigasaurs. Like all bullshit riddles, it's a simple answer masked under an immensly complex initial problem: the Gordian Knot of puzzles. Mr. Marker Man immediately tried to untangle it through bringing out a calculator. Devin teaches you the real lessons: thinking less makes smarter men. Marker Men.

Puzzle 9: Plushie Appreciation

The most decadent exploration of my perverted desires - apart from all the other ones - this plushophilia chapter is the longest in the novelette. It's designed as the most intimate representation of the nature of Aleph and Nepenthe's relationship, and a demonstration of how their respective personalities influence their appropriation of obscure sexual fetishes. I could have written this in the first article, but I forgot. As expected of a long chapter, I put in a long puzzle alongside it - one which, in principle, is the longest to sort out even with the explicit instructions given. Don't worry, this one is actually solvable.

This one is unusual, because it has an "instructions.txt" file, where Aleph simply tells you what to do. ("okay fine I could have written this out in a cute poem but I've been working on this for like two hours and I'd honestly be surprised if anyone gets this far, RIGHT NEPENTHE?") There is also "names-species.txt", which is a list of all plushies and names, unsorted, with a hex code next to each one. You have to pair all plushies with their appropriate names, and delete any line with unknown info. These two files don't give you enough information to solve the puzzle on their own, forcing you to seek out other sources.

How do you solve it? This is going to sound crazy, but you have to read the novel to read the novel. The associated chapter with this puzzle, "006-plushie-appreciation.txt", contains a majority of the plushies and names. However, it doesn't contain everything. In particular, you need to remember that one of the plushie species were mentioned in an earlier chapter of the novel - without which, you may find yourself stuck. The name-species pairs will fall into place, and the hex codes, when combined and decoded as two columns, will reveal the password.

There is no alternate solution here, because the instructions are explicit, all the pieces are provided for you, and there is only a bit of lateral thinking required. I wanted this puzzle to act as an increase in difficulty that takes advantage of the dual prosaic-puzzle nature of this game, ensuring that readers are reading the work rather than speeding through the puzzles.

Is it manipulative to make readers engage with the writer's badly-disguised fetish in order to solve an otherwise disconnected puzzle? Look, you read the content warnings. You knew there was plushie fucking. Don't come to me when you find out Showgirls has boobies.

Also, I have this horrible, horrible confession to make for this segment. It is the worst thing I have ever done in my entire life, and I am telling you this as an act of absolution so that I may never enact this sin again. This is worse than making a bad puzzle in a puzzle game, and for being non-heterosexual... combined!

When I was coming up with species names for the novel, I was stuck coming up with a thematically appropriate and snappy species for one of the plushies. Having spent a half-hour of a 72 hour budget trying to come up with a sequences of bytes that appropriately affirms my contributions to the literary canon, and my savoir-faire, I knew I needed some assistance. I could have asked Mr. Marker Man for assistance, but he was employed, so that was no good. I could have asked my other friends (implying), but this was a secret work of more importance than the Manhattan Project and Star Citizen combined.

So, I did something unthinkable: I used AI Bing Chat to generate a species name. Now, I didn't use it, because I am a possum of honour. Because I believe strongly that large language models were brought upon us by the descendents of Yog-Sothoth, seeking to bring upon the destruction of humanity by distracting us with coomer chatbots, and also because Bing's suggestions sucked. AI has absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever and is a completely mechanical non-art that requires no human input to create convincing depictions of reality - unlike photography, which had no controversy whatsoever upon its introduction.

This is cruel and morally bankrupt, and not in accordance with the socialist lifestyle, and I will never again make the mistake of using emergent technologies to integrate human creativity with the limitless possibility of scientific progress. Never again will I lazily plagiarize - I mean deliberately choose not to plagiarize, because I didn't use the suggestions, because they were worse than what a human came up with, and also weren't even attributable to an author - a few bytes of data for less than 0.006% of my free and libre science fiction novellette. (1 word out of 17,500 - I did the math.)

I now recognize the error of my ways, and I will never again commit copyright infringement by creating original works through external influences, nor by appropriating any copyrighted materials for usage in memes, satire, and other exercises of the increasingly meagre free speech offcuts of permission culture that is thrown down upon us by small groups of rich old men in suits. As opposed to a cultural revolution of public domain independently generated works requiring substantial human input that no corporation can ever hold control over or meaningfully profit off of in any way, and whose business model relies on giving out free access to state of the art generative technologies to every internet user in the entire world, allowing for the democratization of these mediums outside the influence of a proprietary and for-profit walled garden ecosystem headed by unaccountable oligarchs and corrupt politicians for the purpose of making the world worse for the increasingly marginal benefit of sociopathic bureaucrats.

Because that would be evil.

Puzzle 10: Plushie Analysis

Another aftermath chapter, with a more fiendish puzzle this time. You can tell that things are heating up in the There Is Love In Me puzzle difficulty ranking fandom. Another single-solution puzzle featuring some lateral thinking, creative use of file metadata, and Microsoft FUCKING my PUSSY, fuck MICROSOFT and FUCK EVERYONE WHO USES MICROSOFT WINDOWS 10, HOLY CRAP LOIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We'll get to that. Loading the puzzle reveals a single file named "imbackagainlol.txt". Nepenthe has a go at another devious trick, giving a hint about things being "hidden in plain sight." Each other file in the directory is prefixed by a period, which hides them by default on most operating systems. This means you have to enable hidden files in your file browser. Like most things, this is trivial on Linux but idiotically unintuitive on Windows, whose file explorer has apparently had no updates since 2011. Except for adding "3D objects" to the favourites bar, which I have used extensively every single day for my use case of VR Chat gooning.

As usual, my one playtester shattered my baseline assumptions. Apparently, Mr. Marker Man, who is a programmer by trade, and had used KDE for two years at this point, had never had cause to enable hidden files. Nor even knew the keyboard shortcut, or file browser option, to do so. I had also discoverd he had the horrifying settings of having folders in icon view, which was the single worst default setting on every Linux distribution until Ubuntu enabled Snap by default. But, you know, he's a frontend programmer. This is just what they do.

After getting past the insurmountable obstacle of pressing a single keyboard shortcut, you are faced with a deluge of text files with filenames formatted in binary. Each filename is unique, and represents a single binary string. As is usual, the binary strings can be decoded to find the password - so long as you know how to sort them, of course. The combination of knowledge required here is intoxicating. First you must recognize how binary numbers function, and then you must recognize that you should put them in the correct order. There many possibilities, and even then, sorting them isn't enough to divine the solution.

There are many hints to the nature of the puzzle. The first is that each file is one of eight different sizes, from 2 to 9 bytes. (Why it isn't 1 to 8 bytes is beyond my Loonix comprehension.) So, just sort them by file sizes, right? No, because you get stuck with meaningless values. It's a hint to lead you on the right track, where you must group each file together into 8 different sections, but how you're supposed to do that will require some additional insight. Or just guessing. That works, too.

This is also quite a long puzzle to execute, even if you know how to do it. This is one of the limitations of not having an engine - you need to assume the vendor does what you want them to do, which isn't the case on Linux Mint. If I had control over the environment, this would be less frustrating to execute, because I could present the content in a predictable fashion. Although, there is a cheeky little way to bypass the "binary" puzzle, if you happen to remember an old webcomic...

This puzzle used to be easier. It was such that each group of 8 files had a random extension name alphabetically assigned to them, from "a" to "h". So, for instance, you'd have fake Adobe Illustrator files alongside fake HTML files. The insight was discovering that these file types were irrelevant, aside from their alphabetization, and did not contain any runnable code at all. So, no, you wouldn't have to install an obscure and obsolete shareware program named "Monkey's Audio" to run the funny ".ape" file.

Once again, Windows Explorer is absolute shit, because it made the mind-bogglingly idiotic decision to hide most file extensions by default. Among other things, it lets you hide executable files as non-executable files, and more importantly would have made it slightly harder to solve my puzzle. I unironically think the "linux subsystem" thing they have going on is more capable than the rest of the OS. Yes, you heard it here first: Windows is just a shell for Ubuntu.

This is where the "watch out for the spam" comment came from. It was more impactful to be absolutely deluged with file extensions with random garbage than it is to see a neat and tidy column of plaintext files. So, it still tangentially fits, but is less funny than it could have been. Nepenthe is a naughty mistress. She'll make you stream data, and won't even clean up your bits.

So, what happened? Microsoft happened. Yes, File Explorer is the single worst piece of crap on the OS in an endless deluge of absolutely terrible software. (The registry editor doesn't count because the registry is beyond human comprehension.) But that's not why I re-engineered my entire project. You may remember me bitching about the hidden 260 character file path limit in Windows? Yes, this puzzle, nested within 8 folders on my initial file structure, was what finally hit the character limit.

I had to restructure my folders such that each passworded zip file was all in one directory, rather than all zipped up into each other. Initially it was such that you could only access chapters in linear order, requiring you to look at each puzzle before going onto the next one. Now all the passworded zip files are displayed in a single folder. This ended up being a benefit because it was much easier to change individual puzzles, but it did spoil the chapter names, which is disappointing.

The way I discovered this was the most Microsoft way I had discovered anything ever, although still better than NVIDIA drivers on Linux. Say you want to program an error message, telling the user that you can't make a file path with over 260 characters. What's the best thing to tell the user? That it's related to your internet security settings, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the internet!

How do you get to those settings? Open up your Internet Explorer settings through a UI that's as old as Windows XP, and slide the security settings slider down to its lowest option. Except that only goes down to "Medium" security, because users cannot be trusted to control their own computer. So, just manually uncheck everything in the dozens of badly explained checkboxes in a tiny scrollbox tucked away in a submenu of a submenu. Even though at no point have you ever used, or will ever use, Internet Explorer on that device.

Did that fix it? Of course not, because Windows hates your guts! I thought this had to do with my Windows Defender settings, so I disabled everything. (Note: Microsoft does not let you disable everything without a registry hack, even though antiviruses are themselves viruses.) Same error message. I thought it had to do with my filenames tripping something up in Windows, since having 64 different random file extensions might have given poor old Windows 10 the vapours. (Never mind that the files contained no executable content, and Windows Defender randomly deletes files you try to open...)

So, I reorganized the puzzle into its current iteration, renaming all of the files and making them into extensionless text files. Still the same error. I thought it had to do with the absence of extensions, because the threat model of Windows was so insane that I genuinely thought this might be a problem. So, I appended ".txt" to all the files. Same result. It was only after I got the error in a different folder of my game that I decided to do some research.

Through this, I found out about the undocumented, unexplained 260 filepath character limit from a random thread on the Microsoft Community forums. Which could have been put into an error message, but wasn't. I also had the pleasure of learning that Windows actually has the capacity to handle filepaths longer than 260 characters... if you change a group policy setting, which is disabled by default. What the hell is a "group policy setting"?

And after all of this, after booting into Windows 10 again to take a screenshot of that error message for the article, guess what it decided to throw up again? A different error box. One named "explorer.exe", with a single line saying "The directory name is invalid", with a line of whitespace accidentally above it, with no error code, and a single "OK" box. And it silently prevents you from right-clicking on some files - as in, it will not physically bring up a right-click menu. But only on some files. Not all of them.

Fuck you, Microsoft.

Puzzle 11: Aleph Antiphon

Hey, remember when I said that this was the puzzle that everyone would get filtered by, as opposed to any one of the eight different puzzles that preceded it and which I vastly underestimated the apparent difficulty of? Yeah, this one's fucked up. Even more so than the puzzle which is mathematically broken, because that one had an alternate solution. If you can't solve this one... you're fucked!!

I think every good adventure game needs a puzzle which is objectively bullshit, and every good puzzle game needs one showcase of the writer's fetish for human misery. Even better if it involves deeply reading the lore, making grand inferences, lots of trial and error, multiple decoding steps, and any number of equally plausible solutions which are all equally wrong. I'm grateful for the opportunity to showcase all of these! And if you complain about any of this, just remember: there is always a more evil dev.

The spoiler section for this puzzle is about 450 words, so you can imagine describing this will be long. There are six files to the puzzle: the novel chapter, four data-dense text files, and one nearly empty one. The empty one was hex edited to contain a single null character, and is actually one byte... and not those snooty two-byte files that were in the last puzzle.

Each of the filenames form a poem giving cryptic hints as to what to do with the data. The first one, "and-time-becomes-a-loop.txt", is an infinity symbol within the sentence "and time becomes a loop." This is a bit of a red herring. The infinity symbol is meant to be read as the number 8, which is the current chapter number. You must find 8 pieces of data to begin with the puzzle... perhaps time-related. Hmm.

This file is a neat reference to an excellent electronic album, "Orbital 2," and the intro song "Time Becomes." That song repeats the stated lyric over and over again, which fits in with the the "sideways 8" symbol displayed within those lyrics. (manually indenting the sentences was a bitch, but beauty is pain.) I learned partway through that the lyric is actually "where time becomes a loop," but there was NO WAY I was redoing another puzzle.

The second file, "i-must-then-negate-it.txt", contains the Roman numeral II (meaning "2"), made out of the mathematical symbol "NOT", which looks like a little hook: ¬ . Surrounding it is the colon symbol, : . The NOT symbol is also known as the negation symbol, so you must negate, or remove, colons. Wouldn't you know it, our timekeeping system uses a colon to separate numbers. Another hint, but there's more. The Roman numeral II is made out of... two columns. And perhaps with emphasis on the second of the two. Must we sort our times in this format?

"octothorpe-blues.txt" is interesting. It's a fake hexdump in the shape of a number sign, also known as an "octothorpe." (Mr. Marker Man will make it a point of pride that he does, indeed, know what an octothorpe is.) When the leftmost values are decoded, it gives another hint, suggesting you should "negate the number sign" - similar to the past file's negation hint. But where do the number signs come from? You'll see. You'll all see.

The fourth file, "three-fore-see-the-ever-free-youth.txt", is a checksum, seeing as it is a checkmark inside a series of sums. The checksums within the file are fake - they don't matter at all, as is hinted by the rest of the digits being zeroed out. So, if the data is worthless, what can we divine? Maybe the filename, as with the other filenames, serve a purpose. And maybe, if you're quite a curious quizmaster, you'll query a quizzism, and a quizzly elucidation to the quizzicalities of a quizzically quizzacal, uh, pickle.

The final file is "zealously-null-terminated.txt". This one is just sad. It has nary a valid encoding to its name, stuck with a meagre null terminator. Let's not even look at it, nor its hints of terminating nulls. 'tis better for all involved.

Okay, we have all the information needed to solve the puzzle. What are we supposed to do? Look at the chapter and write down all 8 unique times within it in 24 hour format, including inferred times and those written as words. Put them in separate lines. Delete the hours from all times (the first column), and delete the colons, as well as the zeros. Convert the remaining numbers into hexadecimal, and remove all the number signs from it. You will get an 8 digit alphanumeric string, and if you put this into the password field... it will be wrong, because there are capital letters. Consistent with the password rules explained to you 9 puzzles ago, you must make them all lowercase. And then, finally, you will have the correct password!

To quote Mr. Marker Man, weeks after the fact: "that puzzle was fuckkkked (edited.)"

Puzzle 12: REDACTED

The SCP Foundation has been a great influence on my writings, including the format of the document logs within the novellette. Part of the joy is in seeing the strange pictures that authors come up with in order to establish a visual baseline. I thought it would be neat to pay tribute to those creative use of free culture images, and created the idea of Aleph using "cognitohazards" (an image that kills you if you look at it) to protect their Real Taigasaur Fanfiction - stolen from the Foundation, of course. (who are apparently now canon in the TILIM universe - whoops.) Lo and behold, this was the first puzzle I designed, nestled within a cop-out chapter consisting entirely of [REDACTED].

It was fortunate that I designed this puzzle before I set the difficulty of the other ones, because it gave me an opportunity to build a difficulty curve around it, whether I treat this one as a climax, or as a denounement. As you can guess from the difficulty of the fuckkkked puzzle, I went with denounement. I knew this was one of the last chapters in the novelette, so it didn't matter so much if it was too hard or too easy. Also nobody is getting this far anyway.

Thanks to the ample images, this puzzle acts as a visual treat, in contrast to the many abstract and data-drive puzzles before it. The structure is such that there are many different types of files, with some of them useless, another set useful, and all of them with references for well-read scippers to enjoy. They are also given a bit of a lore dump, both to enhance Aleph's retro fetishism, and to provide some implications of the perverted sexual habits of fictional species. For instance, "hot-buns-volcabbit-x-barracal.txt", which was inspired by those Cinderace fanfictions I had read oh my god I love Cinderace so goddamn much I want to kiss his bunny paws ALL OVER I NEED HIM TO BE REAL GOD DAMN IT

All of the images are defined by the specifications of either VGA or CGA graphics, both in resolution and in colour. Old computing graphics worked by taking an index of colours, and alternating pixels such that it provided the illusion of more colours - a process known as "dithering." This also means that savvy nerds can use the colour palette to hide hexadecimal information in, such as the fictional "genderqueer" redesign, which was based on the Free Speech Flag. You would have to be an OG terminally online computer nerd to get any of this, but that's my target audience.

In keeping with the puzzle being a "reward" of sorts, I ensured there were four different solutions, so that you can feel clever for solving it any number of ways. In keeping with the Mr. Marker Man tradition of "overcomplicate things until you right click on something," I will admit that the solutions vary wildly in difficulty and can vary from trivial to genuinely difficult - the Recipe for Disaster of There Is Love In Me puzzles. Which is a niche market, I admit, but if Mr. Marker Man got a Quest Cape as an ironman while unironically killing hill giants for limpwurts, then you can spend 1,000 hours less to solve this puzzle.

There isn't much to say without completely spoiling it, so I will say that, in addition to those sneaky colour palette encodings, there are two easier solutions that amount to "scroll down this huge file and use your eyes." If you poke around with hash schemes and character encodings, as you surely have by this point, you will have no trouble at all. There is also one puzzle, which is a nearly-empty HTML file with a secret in its source code, which would make it quite easy to solve if you knew where to look.

This is where I remark that Mr. Marker Man, who apparently works with websites, did not think to inspect the one relevant span ID with the password in it, instead choosing to concoct a complicated scheme involving octal to binary conversion with fixations on memory values he made up while splitting fake MD5 sums into discrete decimal values, eventually taking 45 minutes to look up the spoilers and find out he could have solved this in less than a minute. Also rolling up to Elvarg with an iron dagger. What a guy.

Puzzle 13: Ashes Adjacent

This one is really cool, so I'm not going to spoil it. (I have to leave a little something on the table, for that sweet user engagement.) That includes providing a screenshot of the puzzle, which will surely lead you astray. What I will say is that, whatever your initial instinct is, it's wrong. And if you've read up until this point, including all the words that are longer than the novel itself, then I would really encourage you to just give it a try for yourself. If Mr. Marker Man can do it, so can you!

Actually he couldn't, so this shill doesn't work.

Download my shit.

Puzzle 14: Nepenthe Answers

And finally, the game ends on a really simple puzzle, calling back to the first one, with a trivial solve.

I'll let you figure this one out. :">

EOF 2

Thank you everyone who has been eagerly awaiting the release of Part 2 - all four of you. I have been fishing on RuneScape and writing this article for two weeks, and as you can imagine, I have gained much experience from it. Not life experience, no of course not. Did you know that to get from level 80 Fishing to 91, you would need to gain about 3,900,000 exp? If you AFK Barbarian Fishing for 50,000 exp an hour, you would have to work an 8-hour shift nine and a half times to get there. This is a great skill. Just flawless design.

Also, for those of you worried that Mr. Marker Man was unfairly demonized in the course of this article, rest assured that I had shown those paragraphs to him before publication, and we had agreed that it was okay for me to publicly humiliate him in a platonic and nonsexual manner. Except for the hidden files thing because that was fucking hilarious oh my god how did he not know how to do that. It's been TWO FUCKING YEARS, dude. READ THE MANUAL. GOD.

Ending on that positive note, I have absolutely no more to say about my Strawberry Jam 8 There Is Love In Me Download Now Free itch.io! Except for the 20% of this article I had to cut for time and space, and also because I'm sick of working on the same thing for a whole month. I mean a second time.

The tl;dr? I came in 35th place out of 76 entries, with 3.453 overall rating. (raw data here.) I also was #7 in Narrative, #8 in Novelty, and #9 in Stealth. Getting three top-ten results in such a large jam is an incredible result. Most people who had played the game, or read the PDF version, found value in the title. My target audience especially enjoyed it. My game only has 187 downloads as of yet, but that's 187 downloads I wouldn't otherwise have gotten the privilege to share myself with. (Shout-outs to all 7 of my baidu.com bros.)

However, itch.io applies a smoothing algorithm to lesser-played games, to prevent ratings manipulation. I consistently ranked in the bottom three least-played games of the entire jam, including many times where I was 76 out of 76. It turns out making a niche product leaves you in a niche - who knew? The non-adjusted score, for all games, means I would have come in #12 overall, with #2 in Narrative, #2 in Novelty, and #2 in Stealth. The Strawberry Jam Discord called it a "popularity tax." I just call it the rules of the game. I made the thing. That's good enough for me.

If you've been a very good gamer, I may even reward you by complaining about this in depth... some other day. Or month. Or never. But for now, as the stoic, intellectual, physically uncomfortable, and emotionally blunted Taigasaurs would say: stay cheesy, homeslice!

View PART 1 HERE.

Disposable Arts by Disposable Dev is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0