Random Fish

[mystery_fish]

Overall, I liked this year's Hunt. Massive bonus points for the writing team being who they were, for the theme, and for high production values (world map art and the treasure chest). Good job on metas and publishing plans for the School of Fish round. Meh about the story and missed opportunities. Endgame could have been improved a lot

Comments

[rivenwanderer]

We initially had the voyage financed by a Dr. Goodly, who halfway through would turn out to actually be evil. But the open-endedness (like the fact that the workshop/ocean runarounds could be done in any order and didn't block working on other rounds) meant that it was hard to put plot like that in the hunt, and we ended up simplifying the plot a bunch in October. I do wish we'd been able to be more ambitious plotwise, but I think we made the right call about erring on the side of simplicity given our open structure.

[mystery_fish]

I agree you made the right decision to err on the side of simplicity. I just expect you to do even better next time you write ;)

[davidglasser]

We didn't really sync up with you after Connect the Ducks so I'm glad to hear that the Cambridge crew had fun finishing it too. Honestly I was surprised we finished first!

And thanks for finishing up Benny Lava for us ... there were two of us left, we started learning how to use iMovie or YouTube's caption editor, neither of them were fun, we were exhausted, and we fell asleep.

[mystery_fish]

When we were a few steps away from the end, I went to a computer to try to guess the answer based on the data we had. While there, I noticed you had already called it in but I kept quiet about it to not spoil things. A little later someone (I think JW) comes in and lets us know you guys were done. Everyone looked at him for a moment, then shrugged and continued solving the conundrum anyway.

I took a shortcut when calling in Benny Lava (and Imba) - I sent Sealab a link to someone else's existing thing, explaining that we didn't have the manpower to make one ourselves but the link otherwise fulfilled the requirements. Less fun, but I wanted to get back to puzzles.

[dr4b]

hi! That was funny figuring out who you were as I was reading this.

Did your treasure chest not have hinges on it? My team just took the hinges off with a screwdriver to open it. We worried about the locks much, much later.

I mostly thought it was strange to unlock a duck conundrum so late in the hunt. Thus the fact that it was pretty straightforward seemed logical. I agree that they are good excuses to interact with people and it bothers me when most people's approach to solving them is "one or two people with a whiteboard and post-its for state diagrams".

I wonder if you went by us when you saw a team doing the charades in Lobby 7 or not? We took a very long time with it, from like 3:15-4:15pm or so, but we also had 6 clues.

[mystery_fish]

There were hinges, but I don't remember them registering to me when opening the box.

Our guess on the late conundrum was that it might have been so weaker teams would have something fun to do late in the Hunt (e.g. OK, you have no shot at hitting runaround, but here's some ducks).

We do dramatic voices when solving conundrums - this year it was reading the festival descriptions as they came up. Last year we each took the role of one of the cooks and acted out all the steps in character, which was hilarious (and/or we were sleep-depped).

Based on our team log, we went to see the whale around 3:30, so it probably was you guys.