Draft Tracks' Secret Hunt, Postmortem.

Quick primer.

Draft Tracks is a map mod pack for Ring Racers. There is also an older SRB2Kart pack of the same name.

My discovering of the first thread.

I was building a pack of map packs checking to find any missing maps in Lost & Found. Unfortunately, there was a missing map I needed to unlock. The first problem was that it was singleton so loading the mods where the surrounding maps in the menu were featured didn't reveal which pack did it. I had to load all the newly added mods one at a time till I eventually found it was from Draft Tracks. 

The next unfortunate thing was that the mod page had no hint of a secret besides a cheeky "did you see it?" in the used mapnums spoiler. This is when I pulled out HVR to try and find the warp like I have with some previous secrets in other packs because I was already sick of it. Just my luck that the ACS scripts were obfuscated to hide which map had warp functions. Eventually, I noticed after way to long the last race map in the pack was very suspicious with a lot of extra map that wasn't used for the race. 

I started digging around looking for how to warp into the sectioned off rooms and eventually found a hidden door in HVR. I did some labbing in game and with lots of effort found out how to enter it. Once I entered the room, this is when I realized that I found the first thread in an ARG that I will need help to solve.

Solving the first room.

I sent some messages and screenshots of what I found in the Kart Krew discord server to get attention. I eventually got the attention of Yoshi (@yoshi_the_mage) who informed about what the secrets were in reference to.

Note: I did find out what the secrets were in reference to beforehand from looking up the name of the secret map in discord and finding Yoshi's messages about the references the SRB2K versions of the maps were making long before the hunt, but he is the first to mention the references in the hunt itself publicly because I didn't want to give spoilers to the reward.

Bastion Isle and the secret map were from a Super Mario World Kaizo rom hack trilogy called Grand Poo World. GPW 2 and 3 in particular had secrets hunts in the as well which needed to be solved to beat the games. From what we could tell, it seemed that the first room we found was in reference to the hidden block room puzzle where the solution was hidden somewhere else in the game.

How we eventually solved this was because I think frog (@frog_0) who I think was informed of the hunt by War Anvil (@mightywaranvil) found hidden patterns by touching certain points on the map to reveal parts of the solution. They seemed to be hidden in the race maps with each one having part of the code. We were all searching around with frog getting the first 3 while Yoshi found the last one on Afterhour Alcazar.

We imputed the solutions in order of the maps and it opened up the second room.

The tiresome second room.

This room is in reference to the Lunar Magic puzzle from GPW2. This time, it's a bunch of "map things" (Doom mapping term for a kind of object that can be placed in a map.) and a keyboard input to type in a word or phrase.

Everyone who was involved with the hunt was really tired by this point, plus I was having struggles getting my HVR to start a test because I forgot an important step. I was having to say sorry for how I was speaking not being as effective of a communicator and assuming everyone can hear my thoughts.

The puzzle ended with Yoshi being informed of the answer from another discord server. I pretty much had 90% of the solution in my head solved, but was missing how to turn the thing IDs into letters to input. I think I almost solved it too, but I was assuming it wasn't right or was bad at connecting the numbers to the letters. Doesn't matter though as someone else from another server discovered the solution, not me. It wasn't particularly clever either.

You take the map things in order of the arrow in the room, then you take each one's thing ID and add the constituent numbers together and connect that with a letter from the alphabet. (ex. 2694, 2+6+9+4 = 21, 21st letter is U) They spell the phrase that solved the second room.

Even before we found it, most people were already giving up and use commands or used a SOC file to play the map. Yoshi even said the map was made for gameplay technique nerds who wouldn't have been interested in these puzzles anyway.

The map itself.

Absolute banger. If the puzzles were better designed, maybe it wouldn't have been as exhausting to unlock. If you want to try it out I have written a guide on the mod's mb page with the steps to play and unlock the map.

Conclusion

This ARG is not helping the case that ARGs are actually fun to play instead of just watching. If the map had better puzzles or wasn't hidden behind the ARG at all, it would have been a better experience.

I'm going back to developing the mega map pack and then vibe race some more.

If any of the designers are reading, hope this helps yall become better designers because of my writings. The maps were fire, but those damn puzzles were not gas bro.