There's always another secret [Potential IFComp 2024 Spoilers]

Competitions IFComp
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41

I’ll still post the tab sequence. Admittedly, it does follow the pattern of code that got wholesale-stripped, leaving the leading spaces there. Which is weird. But probably nothing.

However…you’ve all given me an unintentional bonus game. I’m having fun, lol.

Forgive my integer/sequence fixation. :woman_shrugging:

Sequence translations

Tab Counts

10000101010123210123210101232101232101012321012321012321012321012321010123210101232101232101232101232101232101012321012321010123210123210123210101010123210101012321012321012321012321012321010123210101012321012321012321010123210101232101010123210123210123210123210123210123210123210101012321010101232101010123210123210101012321012321010101010123210101012321010123210123210123210123210101232101232101232101232101012321012321012321010123210123210101232101232101012321012321012321012321010101010123210100

Binary

0100000000010001000100011011100100011011100100010001101110010001101110010001000110111001000110111001000110111001000110111001000110111001000100011011100100010001101110010001101110010001101110010001101110010001101110010001000110111001000110111001000100011011100100011011100100011011100100010001000100011011100100010001000110111001000110111001000110111001000110111001000110111001000100011011100100010001000110111001000110111001000110111001000100011011100100010001101110010001000100011011100100011011100100011011100100011011100100011011100100011011100100011011100100010001000110111001000100010001101110010001000100011011100100011011100100010001000110111001000110111001000100010001000100011011100100010001000110111001000100011011100100011011100100011011100100011011100100010001101110010001101110010001101110010001101110010001000110111001000110111001000110111001000100011011100100011011100100010001101110010001101110010001000110111001000110111001000110111001000110111001000100010001000100011011100100010000

Grouped Binary

01000000 00010001 00010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00010001 10111001 00010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 00010001 00011011 10010001 00010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00010001 10111001 00010001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 00011011 10010001 00011011 10010001 00010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00010001 00011011 10010001 00010001 10111001 00010001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00010001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00010001 00010001 00011011 10010001 00010001 10111001 00010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 10111001 00011011 10010001 00010001 00010001 10111001 00010000

Single-Byte Integers

64 17 17 185 27 145 27 145 185 17 185 27 145 185 27 145 185 17 185 17 185 27 145 185 27 145 185 17 185 27 145 27 145 185 27 145 17 27 145 17 185 27 145 185 27 145 185 17 185 17 27 145 185 27 145 27 145 27 145 17 185 27 145 185 27 145 185 27 145 185 17 27 145 17 185 17 27 145 185 17 27 145 185 17 17 27 145 17 185 17 185 27 145 185 27 145 27 145 185 27 145 185 17 185 27 145 185 17 185 27 145 27 145 185 17 185 27 145 185 27 145 17 17 185 16

Interesting that there’s only a single streak: the twin 17s at the start. There’s also only a single64 and 16, and they’re at the start and end, respectively. :star_struck: That’s pretty cool!!

Characters

Nothing recognizable comes up when converting these to characters, even when using two bytes per character.

Anyway, that was a grand time, lol. Integer sequence autism blast concluded! :grin:

I cannot be killed disappointed in a way that matters, as I have already won experienced joy. :sparkles:

7 Likes
42

Shades of one of my favorite aesthetic touches in Myst…
53-BlueProjector

8 Likes
43

There’s a book in Winter-Over about a Miss Gosling case.

EDIT:

It’s a movie:

You spot a movie called THE LAST OF THE DRUIDS: A MISS GOSLING MYSTERY . The title is rendered in a cheesily overblown 1970s-style font, and the cover shows a cartoonishly hooded figure menacing an old woman — this could be exactly what you’re looking for! You grab the DVD and flip it over to read the summary.

When the quaint English village of Marswich Green is disrupted… (You skim a bit.) The sinister plots of Disgybl Gwydion, heir to the ancient Druids… Miss Gosling faces her greatest test against the spirit of the immortal sorcerer… What horrible secrets now lie buried beneath the calendulas?!

Marswich Green, druids, Gwydion, sorcery?
Secrets beneath the calendulas?

Anyone encounter some calendulas in the game you’re playing?

4 Likes
44

There’s a Liber Animarum in Bureau of Strange Happenings. Here’s what it says:

This is a cryptic tome written by someone named Petrus Catadesmicus:

“…what these near-sighted Fools took as Rituals of Cursing are in truth Rituals of Binding, the true Congelation of the Soul, the Chaining of the immaterial Soul to a material Anchor, by piercing with a Spike the written true Name of the subject, thus transfixing the Soul and holding it fast, should the Environment be appropriately Consecrated, and appropriately Deep within the Earth…”

BOSH, The Den, and Winter-Over all mention Miss Gosling in the credits, so that’s something to keep an eye out for.

Edit: “look up [subject] in [book]” is implemented, though to far I haven’t found anything. That might be something to experiment with.

6 Likes
45

No, sorry, that’s just us being inefficient with the way the Template Toolkit generates pages. I’m not that clever.

4 Likes
46

There are calendulas in the garden in Miss Gosling. Ordering Watson to dig near them will reveal an ancient chamber with a stone slab. I haven’t figured out what to do with it yet. You can also get the dog wet by making him go in the bathtub and turning on the tap, which could maybe be the kuwac hapanza ritual mentioned in The Den, but again I haven’t figured out what it does yet.

Also, examining the mail seems to indicate that BOSH, The Den, and Winter-Over are the only other games involved.

2 Likes
47

Too bad you didn’t fixate on the unintentional bonus game of checking out the code and figuring out where those patterns come from and how to streamline the templates :stuck_out_tongue:

3 Likes
48

I wouldn’t put it past @inventor200 to convert the whitespace pattern to base64, then reverse engineer it as a SHA-512 hash, and interpret the result as a Baconian cipher to come up with a scone recipe written in ancient Zapotec. Coding a SSH client from scratch is more difficult than this and she’s done it already. Mad I tell you, mad!

3 Likes
49

Okay, I’m getting closer: “piercing with a Spike the written true Name of the subject” and “the kuwac hapanza […] replaces the nails or spikes” makes me think that I have to have Watson stand on the slab and bite something with Gosling’s name on it. I tried the mail and it gave me a special message, but nothing else. Maybe because it has “no soul to it, none at all”?

Edit: I figured it out! I won’t spoil it except to say I was on the right path.

5 Likes
50

That’s really cool! I love this kind of thing, but I’ll only give suggestions and not actually get involved because I’d never do any reviews. So, you go guys! And congrats to @svlin for getting even further.

1 Like
51

One of the strange similarities that caught my attention were the games “Sidekick” and “Dust”, both of which feature Western themed mysteries with similar looking cover art. That may all be coincidence, though, and from reading this thread it sounds like there is another set of games even more conspicuously linked.

3 Likes
52

I think that one is coincidence; I did a little beta testing for both, and Dust is the translation of an earlier German game called Staub and has serious themes while Sidekick is a goofy fun game made in Dialog with links. Both are pretty fun!

3 Likes
53

Sorry :woman_shrugging: I love coding but I am deeply obsessed with integers. One of these is gonna have priority when they both pop up.

4 Likes
55

Has anyone else gotten any closer regarding this puzzle?

EDIT: Only 12 days?! That felt like an eternity to me!

1 Like