Secrets Of The Forge

First and most important about the work I got to do here is a big thank you to many, many people:

• Rob Gallerani
  • Lead designer on the feature who helped me, trusted me, and taught me things I will carry through the rest of my career.
• The Destiny Community and everyone who participated in the event
  
  • Raid Secrets for all the work they did and all the wonderful art they made for us. I want to print some out and frame it! Images in this post call out specific members of the community but they are far from the only ones who worked on this.
  • Streamers like Gladd, Teawrex, Gothalion, Datto, Ninjy, and many more.
• The Entire Black Armory Secrets Team
  • Everything I talk about in this post was done as a collaboration with others. We were a relatively small team and kept most of our secrets pretty well hidden. There are aspects of these secrets that I am very proud of and may have started the ball rolling on, but they would not have been possible by myself.
• Bungie
  • For letting us do such an ambitious event for the community.
• Vicarious Visions
  • For letting me run around for months, like a rabbit with an enery drink IV, working on something I am extremely passionate about.

For DLC 3: Season of The Forge I was a part of something I am very proud of. I was a core member of the team that built the forge secrets as well as built the Niobe’s Torment event. This includes designing the puzzles with Rob. Implementing all the features to support the puzzles. Working with VFX to implement our hidden glyphs. Working with artists to get our assets working for puzzles. Working with a combat designer to implement the seven combat encounters in Niobe’s Torment. Finally, Implementing the code phases for Niobe’s Torment.

In all honesty, this video series, there are 4 videos, probably does a clearer job explaining everything from the community’s perspective than I can. I just hope to maybe give a different perspective!

This will be a long one!

Summary

Content in Season of The Forge surrounded the following:

• 3 Families
  • The Norse Family
  • The Japanese Family
  • The French Family
  4 Forges
  • VolundrGofannonIzanamiBergusia
  Niobe’s Torment
  • Secret culminating event

Every month, for four months, from the start of Season Of The Forge, a forge was opened. In order they were: Volundr, Gofannon, and Izanami. The fourth forge was hidden and locked behind completion of the Niobe’s Torment event. Each forge provided players with a weapon. This weapon’s scope had the ability to reveal secret glyphs hidden by the makers of that weapon. Each forge had a puzzle associated with it. The hidden glyphs were clues and hints that would ultimately help players solve the puzzle. To solve the puzzle you needed to decypher all the clues to get an input code. An input code is a sequence of locations to stand as well as a sequence of glyphs to shoot while standing in those locations. Once a code was input by a fireteam they were rewarded with an emblem which represented the corresponding families crest to show that they had solved the puzzle. I’ll try my best to detail how the event went down for the community from our perspective!

Goals:

We had a few goals for creating this content:

• Needed a lock mechanism
• Brute-force proof
• Simple enough to work for many puzzles
• Low Scope (heh)
• Thematically appropriate
• Data-Mine safe

The solution we came up with was the hidden glyphs mentioned above which you can see here:

 

 

Some further goals

• Watchable
  • We wanted to create content that even people who weren’t involved could watch and cheer on those who were.
  Collaboration between hardcore raiders and puzzlers
  • We wanted content that would challenge both those who participate in worlds first races as well as those who solve all of Destiny’s fantastic puzzles. We wanted to take it further and make it so that they had to collaborate with one another to achieve something amazing for the community.

I think we did a pretty good job achieving our goals. We also stumbled multiple times, but I personally learned a lot and can’t wait to take it all forward to create even better content in whatever I make next.

Weapon Order Cypher

We expected players to just eventually start seeing symbols around the area. However, Rob did hide a clue to let them know something was special about the guns they were forging.

 

This weapons order cypher had four parts.

1. Puzzlers needed to notice that the caliber was too small for real world bullets and needed to convert from imperial to metric then round up to the nearest whole number.
   • 12, 5, 21, 1, 25, 12, 20, 8, 4, 18, 10, 25, 24, 16, 6, 6, 25, 3, 19, 22, 26, 26, 12, 16, 8, 9, 13, 12, 17, 21, 6, 19, 3, 24, 1, 15, 13, 3
   Notice no number is larger than 26 so they can substitute numbers for letters
   • LEUAYLTHDRJYXPFFYCSVZZLPHIMLQUFSCXAOMC
   Based on the clue “RAIL CANNON X4” use a Rail-Fence cypher with 4 rails
   • LHZCZDERLXPJUYHAIXAPMOLFYFQMUYLCFCSSTV
   Based on the clue “CIPHER HILL CORP ACCOUNT #5164” use a Hill Cypher on the text to get the final message
   • ALLWILLBEREVEALEDTHROUGHTHEWEAPONSEYEZ

Which in the end is: ALL WILL BE REVEALED THROUGH THE WEAPONS EYEZ referring to the scopes of the weapons revealing the glyphs

Norse Family Puzzle

Community Threads:

Megathread
Solve thread

Goal

The goal of the Norse family puzzle was to use the clues and glyphs hidden throughout all the forges to decrypt a master message found in the Gofannon forge shown below:

 

Once this message was decyphered it would give you a final poem to solve which would give you the input code. The poem refers to Ulfberht Swords which were considered masterfully crafted weapons in their era and spawned many imitations that poorly tried to mimic their greatness.

Communities Efforts

Data Mining and Out of Bounds

Through some data mining and sneaking around geo the community was able to find some of the pieces of the puzzle earlier than intended.

The community found the master message in the unreleased second forge, the pieces of the Vegvisir as well as the hidden glyphs on the pieces of the Vegvisir.

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Fortunately for us they were unable to see the hidden brackets above the master message, so they still had to wait until the second forge launched to find those. Rob’s strategy of using invisible glyphs to defend against things like this was working.

Celtic Knot

So, one of the first things people found was the Celtic Knot hidden on an object tucked away in a corner. This was great because it is an integral part of the puzzle.

So, the way this works is that by following the maze from the start to the end you can see a series of glyphs. These glyphs each correspond to one of the sub-puzzles for the Norse Puzzle and was a way to decrypt part of the master message.

For example:

The hand glyph appears first. This means that the first part of the master message encapsulated by the first bracket is solved by the clue given by the hand glyph puzzle.

This will make more sense when I talk about each individual puzzle. Which I will do now!

Volundr Paragraph

The paragraph is just a monosubstitution cypher where we gave them the alphabet mapping at the bottom of the glyph.

So now the community knew how to read our Norse family runes! They quickly translated the master message to English and found that it was cypher text.

Sword Puzzle

This puzzle is a glyph of a sword with the word NAGMAR on it. The way you solve with one is it’s an anagram for the word ANAGRAM (Yes, Rob loves dad jokes). So, whenever the Sword matches a bracket in the master message that section is an anagram of the solved text.

Hand Puzzle

 

It might be a little hard to see in the GIF above but there are 7 hands along the wall. Each hand has a series of dots above the fingers. These dots represent a binary code a dot means 1 no dot is 0.

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Translating the dots to binary you got:

10110, 01111, 01100, 10101, 01110, 00100, 10010 =
22, 15, 12, 1, 21, 14, 4, 18

Which when you translate those numbers to the letter at that position in the alphabet you would then get:

‘Volundr’ which was a key word for its cypher text in parts that lined up with the hand in master message.

Ship Puzzle

The ship puzzle was intended to be found once the second forge opened. This ended up not being the case! Once the community knew the Hammerhead revealed glyphs, they immediately snuck back into the second forge and started sleuthing. They found the ship glyph.

When the text is translated it becomes:

Beating
Beating
Beating

Which if you do some research on ships, sailing, and beating you will find that it means to sail in a sort of zigzag pattern which if you do more research or are familiar with cyphers you will come across the zigzag/rail-fence cypher. However, you still needed to know how many rails it had. Well the word beating appears 3 times meaning the ship sections of the master message are rail-fence cyphers with 3 rails!

Vegvisir Puzzle

This was the puzzle the community data mined a bit about and actually was able to solve without finding all the pieces in the game.

Throughout the forges there were these boxes with pieces of the Vegvisir on them.

When looked at through the scope you could see a glyph on them. If you then created the Vegvisir out of all the pieces you would get what the community data mined.

and then you could layer the glyphs on top like so

This created a playfair cypher with the key CRIMSONAQUTXKPEZBDFGHLVWY (Originally, we wanted to have it say CrimsonFish…Red Herring. Rob. Dad Jokes)

Jörmungandr Puzzle

In the maze above you will see a glyph of a snake eating it’s tail this is a glyph for the world serpent Jörmungandr. This decryption method was brute forced by the community because it was a Caesar cypher which is a very easy decryption method to brute force. It was intended to be solved when the third and final forge opened up, but the Destiny community was much too resourceful to wait around for that!

The intended way to solve it was to find the Jörmungandr glyph in the third forge then look at it with the Hammerhead scope. When this was done you would see it has 6 scales. This meant you would decrypt the message with a +6 shift in the Caesar cypher.

Bringing It All Together

So, now that the community had found and solved all of the necessary sub-puzzles, they just needed to put it all together!

 

So what do you do now!? Well the community got to work! (Watching the discord and Raid Secrets sub reddit was super fun)

Eventually it was solved on the RaidSecrets Subreddit

They were stuck on 2 key things:

1. They didn’t know what truth and fraud referred to. Eventually users did some research and found the Ulfberht swords and guessed that the frauds were the imitations and the real swords were the truth.
2. They didn’t know the structure of a solution. When they later solved the Japanese Family puzzle this became more clear and helped them here.

The code the community decyphered was as follows:

1. Shoot the Flame
2. Stand on the Sun (https://i.imgur.com/MYx3SeQ.jpg) and shoot the letters +ULFBERHT+ in order
3. Stand on the Moon and shoot the letters +ULFBERH+T in order
4. Shoot the Storm

Solve Video

From memory this one was solved when I was asleep, so I didn’t get to see it happen live. I did jump into the discord to check out how the community was reacting, and they seemed very relieved to have solved it! They also went and made a fantastic diagrams, to help others get the emblem!

Japanese Family Puzzle

This puzzle was probably the easiest of the 3 to solve. In fact, it was solved first, before the Norse family puzzle. I think this is because it is the best designed one even though from the outside it sounds kind of crazy! It’s definitely my favourite and the one I am also the most excited to talk about!

The weapon required for these glyphs was the Tatara Gaze sniper rifle from the Gofannon forge.

Goal

The goal of this puzzle from a design standpoint was to create a puzzle that incorporated the steps in forging a Katana.

In one brainstorm meeting I threw out the idea of translating those steps into actions and tools in Photoshop. Rob really liked the idea. The team started working with the idea and noticed that it had similar concepts to origami and that just solidified the idea further. Eventually Rob turned the concept into a real puzzle and came to me with a working version that the team had created, I was ecstatic!

So, the goal of the community was to find all the “raw” materials hidden as glyphs that could only be seen with the Japanese family weapon. Then they needed to find all the steps of what to do with those materials. Once they performed all the steps on the raw materials they would have a map that when read would give them the code for the Japanese family crest.

The community’s steps were as follows:

• Step 1 – Gather each piece of the 2 maps (2 solid, 2 hollow).
• Step 2 – Places the pieces on top of each other to match their type
• Step 3 – Fold the 2 maps vertically in half (bottom half over top half).
• Step 4 – Fold the solid map horizontally, place the hollow map on top.
• Step 5 – Stretch the new map by twice its height.
• Step 6 – Add the final piece (fishhook with a few paths).
• Step 7 – Sword seemingly represents getting the final product

Communities Efforts

Once again, the community went right to work. Searching every nook and cranny in the new forge for glyphs.

Finding and Sharing Glyphs
Discussion thread that was deleted (I don’t know why)
More assets including targets, materials, and steps glyphs
And created a new megathread

 

 

And then the community started putting theories together:

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Starting to overlay and put the materials together!
https://imgur.com/a/1tlBrEg

One thing we were worried about was the community having problems actually creating the map even once they understood what to do. I mean getting screen shots in game to then take into a third-party program to manipulate into a pseudo-precise image with relatively small bits in them was kind of an insane ask from us; but gosh did the Destiny community crush it!

The discussions and collaborations continued trying to figure out the steps and how to put it all together. The community started to figure out that they were forging a katana and that was amazing to see happen so organically!

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While others were working on the current theories of what to do with the materials other members in the Discord continued to discuss the meta themes of the puzzle and what the overall goals might be.

Then the first images started to come in and things started to take shape.

It’s coming together!

More discussion from the Discord

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They got very close very fast!

Then came their first attempt at a final map. I can’t believe this worked out so well, it still makes me smile to this day!

But now that the community had a map they needed to figure out how to read it.

As an aside the Japanese family video above does a sped-up process of how to create the map from the raw parts. Timestamp.

I would like to note that at this time the community had still not solved the poem from the norse puzzle. So they didn’t understand that they needed to input a code and that the decyphered puzzle was giving them information on where to stand and what to shoot. Regardless, they got right to work throwing out lots of ideas. Eventually they noticed that all the glyphs in circles were located on the ground and had hooks coming out of them to other glyphs.

While discussion on what to do with the map was going on KaiOT again took the time to clean up the map and make it more readable.

Eventually user Dzho seemed to come up with a solid theory!

Other Raid Secrets users decided to try it out and…

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Solve thread on the Destiny Subreddit
Solve thread on Raid Secrets

Seeing the community get their first emblem was such a relief but also such an adrenaline shot straight to the heart. It was my favourite of the 3 puzzles and I was so excited it actually all worked out! But it was no time to rest for puzzlers they had a previous unsolved puzzle staring them in the face and now they had more information. They now knew the structure of a solution; locations to stand and glyphs to shoot.

You know how this one ended from above!

They community then did their due diligence and started cataloging their efforts and creating things to help and share information to those who weren’t all caught up.

They also added some colour coding to the map!

 

As a small pat on our backs, the first solve thread made it to the front of the main Destiny subreddit and that made us feel fantastic!

French Family Puzzle

This puzzle was a fun one to watch. It was probably the most abstract of the three family puzzles, so we expected it to be a long one. It surprisingly went way faster than we were expecting because of the amount of people that were now invested and active in solving the puzzle. It was really cool to see! I will also get some flack and deaths stares for this one, but I am the one who designed the French etiquette puzzle…and yes it was so that I could watch you argue over French etiquette online!

The weapon for this puzzle was a bow, the Spiteful Fang. One of the challenges we faced on this one was getting the scope to feel right. Every time you shoot with the boy the scope moves around. I had to work a lot with VFX, an awesome coworker Carlos Cheek, to get this working in a way that felt good. There are still some things we would have liked to fix with it but I think the final product was good!

Teawrex and gang might disagree… (we love you!)

The community moved so fast on this one. Solving things on reddit, Discord, and even twitch that I had so much trouble keeping up with where things had been solved.

Goal

So the goal of this puzzle was to solve a Bazeries Cylinder or a Jefferson Disk. I won’t explain exactly how that is done in the standard case but at a high level you are given a bunch of disks with letters, in our case glyphs, on them, you are given an order to place the disks in, and you are given a word or sequence of symbols to line them up to. From there you can rotate it around to find the secret message or again in our case the order of glyphs to stand on and shoot. Generally, there are many disks, but we only had 8 because of development time, time we wanted the community to take to solve it, and some gem limitations discussed below.

So, for us we needed a way to encode an order for our disks. Rob had the idea to use the scabbard of the sword Joyeuse. Which is a very famous French sword with a distinct layout for the gems that adorn the scabbard. You can see it below

So, the idea was that we would assign each gem to one of the French sub-puzzles which we would then use as the order for our disks. We gave them the numbering, as well as the sequence of glyphs to turn their disks to, and a little French blurb which roughly translates to “Turn the wheels 4 turns forward”. This all meant; solve the individual puzzles to get the sequence of glyphs that defines a disk, match the puzzles gem to a numbered gem on Joyeuse to get its order, order all your disks and rotate them to match the given glyphs sequence, then finally turn the wheels 4 turns forward in order to get the true input code to solve the puzzle. (Massive thank you to the artists who translated these gems from 3D to 2D. You can also see we skipped a few gems that we didn’t know how to translate properly and puzzles that were cut because of time or we couldn’t get them working)

As I mentioned, this one was rather abstract. Rob even made physical disks’ to help us visualize it all better!

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Here is the final infographic the community came up with to help others understand the concept.

One final note is that the goal of each sub puzzle was to encode a sequence. So, you’ll see a lot of puzzles be based on things that already define a sequence. For example, sheet music, written text, dining etiquette…I thought this was an extremely clever design by Rob and just wanted to point it out as a specific goal when designing these puzzles.

Let’s see how the community did! I’ll talk about the gems in order and some challenges and try and add some community notes I have from the times they were solving them!

Communities Efforts

Most of the documentation for this one was covered in the general megathread after it had occurred because of how fast they moved on this one.

The community went straight to work and began to understand that it was a Bazeries Cypher after a bit of discussion:

Gem I: White and Circular

White circular gem with a sequence underneath it.

This was an easy one. The goal of it was to just help the community understand the goal of each sub-puzzle was to solve for a sequence. So, for this gem we just gave it to them!

Water – Morning – Woods – Heart – Wings – Missive – Wind – Butterfly – Rose

Gem II: Red and Sheild-Shaped

This one was a Vignere Cypher where the keyword was FLEURDELIS. They cracked this one pretty fast because there are many tools you can use online to try key words quickly!

The French cypher text decyphered to:
VENT
PAPILLON
MATIN AILES
COEUR BOIS
EAU ROSE
MISSIVE

which in English is:
Wind – Butterfly – Morning – Wings – Heart – Woods – Water – Rose – Missive

Gem III: Blue and Circular

Glyph under the gem is a caterpillar with the initials V.H. which are for Victor Hugo. He wrote a very famous poem often referred to as “The Genesis of the Butterfly” which contains references to our 9 symbols.

Comme le matin rit sur les roses en pleurs! (Morning, Rose)

Qu’un éblouissement de folles ailes blanches (Wings)

O printemps! quand on songe à toutes les missives (Missive)

A ces coeurs confiés au papier, à ce tas (Heart)

On croit voir s’envoler, au gré du vent joyeux, (Wind)

Dans les prés, dans les bois, sur les eaux, dans les cieux, (Woods, Water)

De tous les billets doux, devenus papillons. (Butterfly)

Morning – Rose – Wings – Missive – Heart – Wind – Woods – Water – Butterfly

Gem IV: Yellow and Rectangular

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This gem was on a terminal that was actually found on the first day that the first forge opened. This terminal allowed you to interact with it but seemingly did nothing. However, once the community got the French family weapon, they were able to see the hidden gem on it and that once they interacted with it, they found it made a second gem with a sequence under it appear elsewhere in the area. However, it was timed so it was easiest to do with a partner!

Missive – Woods – Morning – Wings – Butterfly – Water – Wind – Rose – Heart

Gem V: Red and Rectangular Smooth Edges

This was a really fun gem! I know art had a lot of fun implementing it! (It was a really big ask and the fact that they were able to do it was amazing! So, a big thank you to them!). Hidden throughout the Gofannon forge were 9 glyphs, and the specific gem. The gem had 9 diamonds around it and each of the glyphs had 1 diamond neary it. As you can see above the Gem diamonds would light up in a specific circular order. The trick to this one requires 2 people. One person watching the gems diamonds the other watching a specific glyph when the glyphs diamond lights up you can match it to the gems diamond to get its order in the sequence for this gem.

For a better explanation check out this part of the video posted above.

Heart – Wind – Wings – Rose – Morning – Butterfly – Missive – Woods – Water

Gem 6: Red and Circular

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This one was pretty funny. It was one that took the community the second longest. The idea was that it was the gem with a sequence of symbols and 3 fencing swords. This meant it was a fence cypher with 3 rails. However, the community seemed to go wild on this one. I think the speed at which they were moving worked against them here and they overlooked the “obvious”. I think the other thing that worked against them was that the ciphered text was symbols and making the leap to put the symbols on rails is a bit different than the standard. In the end they got it, but not before looking too closely into the history and lore behind The Three Musketeers!

Morning Woods Rose (3)
Wind Missive Wings Heart (4)
Water Butterfly (2)

as rails:

Morning . . . . . . . . . . . . . Woods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rose
. . . . . . Wind . . . . Missive . . . . Wings . . . . . . . Heart
. . . . . . . . . . Water . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Butterfly

Morning – Wind – Water – Missive – Woods – Wings – Butterfly – Heart – Rose

Gem VII: Yellow and Shield Shaped

Under the Gem is a music note with ZZZ? next to it. The idea was this represented the song “Frerè Jacques” or “Are you sleeping?”. Throughout the forge there were glyphs with music notes next to them and some music notes without anything next to them. When ordered to the sheet music of the song they gave the required glyph order.

I don’t remember the order that these Gems were solved in but around the time this one was starting to be worked on we noticed Teawrex was streaming and had a lot of viewers watching him!

Puzzles at the top of Destiny’s Twitch!?

Teawrex working on some puzzles!
More puzzling!
There is a lot to find!
Going off the rails!
It’s in the gems!

Even twitch chat was joining in on the fun!

And he even jumped into the Discord to talk with the puzzlers. Seeing streamers interacting with the puzzlers was a fantastic moment for everyone involved as it was a big hope of ours.

Which was a great positive feedback loop of more people becoming interested in the puzzles. Things were picking up steam!

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Well I slammed my face into the French Emblem puzzle all day and made significant progress with many others. Now I dream of the Eiffel Tower… see ya tomorrow!

— Sam (Teawrex) (@TheTeawrex) December 19, 2018

Teawrex helping to recruit puzzlers!

Morning – Wings – Woods – Water – Rose – Missive – Butterfly – Wind – Heart

Gem VIII: Purple and Rectangular

It’s beautiful! The artists did a great job making each one look distinct even though they were so small!

The goal of this to find all the cutlery in the Izanami forge and then order them in the order you would expect to use them in a traditional French meal. (I know someone more knowledgeable than me can prove how my order is wrong, but it worked dang it!).

It’s a butter knife!

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I love you guys. I really do. I also had so much fun watching you argue over the correct dining etiquette! Seeing you think it was a cocktail shaker for hours and rightfully condemning salad knives was a lot of fun and in the end, you got it! You even found one of my resources when I was designing this puzzle! (Maybe next time I’ll do 17 courses?)

In all seriousness I was so nervous during this. I knew it was going to be a contentious, one but I was hoping a consensus would be made and then tried. I think I overestimated everyone’s ability to go and try an idea and instead we saw people rally around individuals with the weapon who could go and try out ideas, so this hurt this puzzle. Choosing something with a more concrete and identifiable sequence would have also helped this puzzle. A concept I was toying with was using the last meal served on the Titanic which was a traditional French meal which if I was able to communicate correctly might have been able to add some concreteness to the meal order. This family puzzle also had the great fallback of not having too many permutations. So that even when the community wasn’t sure of their answer there weren’t thousands of permutations to try if one of the sub-puzzles hadn’t been solved. In the end you got it and to be honest had it for quite a while but continued to second guess it! At least now you are all prepared for a dinner with the King of France?

Wings – Butterfly – Rose – Missive – Heart – Woods – Water – Morning – Wind

Bringing It All Together

The community got a bit stuck on Gem 6 and Gem 8 but they powered through them and started to create some helpful images to figure out the input code.

At this stage Teawrex had come back from recharging and was now at the center of attempts at cracking the code. Going back and forth with the community they eventually arrived at the correct solution which they visualized in their solution image which looks like beautiful chaos.

So as above in the bottom left you can see the theoretical disks aligned in order. The Given encrypted message is marked by the red box. That means the correct solution is 4 columns over or if they were real disks turned 4 times forward. Any time a glyph appeared on the ground it meant stand on it and any time it appeared on a wall it meant to shoot it.

Thus the final code was:

• Stand on Butterfly
  • Shoot Woods, then Missive
• Stand on Morning
  • Shoot Heart twice, Woods, then Wings

Teawrex solving it
Twitch chat seemed to think it was too easy
Knowledge is power!

French family cheat sheet

Pre-Dawning

Around this time in Destiny the Dawning was going to occur. I’ve kept a part of this whole thing hidden. Throughout Simdur’s Cave there were three hidden beacons that required one of the families crest’s to open. Three puzzles Three crests. The community finally had everything they needed to interact with all three beacons. Which once done turned on a screen within the area that displayed a message from us to them.

Which translated to:

“WITH EYES FIXED PAST DAWNS END THE FOURTH FLAME WILL RISE BRING THE KNOWLEDGE OBTAINED BY THE RAIDERS OF SECRETS STEEL THYSELF”

We were announcing that a 4th forge existed and were calling them out by name and telling them to get ready for more because some of our most difficult puzzles were still to come. and boy oh boy did the community love this!

Which translates to:

“with puckered buttholes we patiently wait past Christmas, new year and the last timegate bring it bungie we proclaim in excitement for your challenge has been fucking accepted love raid secrets”

Interesting expectations

Niobe’s Torment

The thrilling climax to our event was interesting. It was nerve wracking, rewarding, scary, humbling, demoralizing and an entire mixture of an emotional cocktail. We tried something extremely different with this activity. Something we wanted to use as a way to bring puzzlers, raiders, and streamers together to work as one big community on one common goal. In many aspects it was successful, and we learned a lot from the things we could improve on. So, let’s get into it!

Megathread
Discussion Thread

Structure

Niobe’s Torment was structured into phases. They were as follows:

1. Lockdown
   1. Everyone working together to figure out how to begin the event.
   Combat Wave
   1. Timed, challenging, diverse waves of enemies and mechanics. Raiders were expected to tackle these sections to then enable the puzzlers to do their work.
   Puzzle Phase
   1. A clue would appear on the monitors in the center of the combat space. Puzzlers were expected to tackle the clue and figure out the code to enter. Codes where of the same nature as puzzles you saw above. Stand at locations and shoot glyphs. Since anyone could just stumble onto this content we made it so that all of these puzzles required knowledge of the prior three family puzzles to make sure that those ones had been completed before Niobe’s Torment could be finished.
      

Steps 2 and 3 came in timed pairs and there were 7 pairs. You had a certain amount of time to complete the combat phase before the puzzle phase started. The puzzle phase would begin whether enemies were still alive or not. If you did not input the correct code for the puzzle phase it would wipe the fireteam. Failing any one of them would return you to the start…Did I mention it was punishing?!

I was very busy watching what was happening on screen at this time as we all wanted it to go well and it was such a unique event. So, I don’t have much more to add to this than what the community did and figured out.

Lockdown

6 glyphs were on the walls leading to the combat area. They told you how to lock down the room. Roughly this translated into this amazing infographic by the community. The idea to the messages above were steps in starting a forge and using knowledge about each family’s puzzle to lock down the room and prove you were worthy to enter the mysterious fourth forge.

When you completed a step correctly you were notified with a pleasant ringing done by our great audio team! (Also what a timely resub)

The community eventually locked down the room and began on the challenges.

Phase 1: Combat

Black Armoury shielded boss who made his minion shanks immune. They dispatched of this boss pretty easily.

Phase 1: Puzzle

Phase 1 was a monitor with a French message. You can see it in the infographic

The way this one was solved is noticing in the loading screen that there was a hand with an arrow to a butterfly hidden in the Black Armory loading screen.

Phase 2: Combat

Boss that continued to spawn enemies until killed. Would hide up in rafters. Again, another easier combat phase. Original we had this boss much higher up and much more interested in hiding. Our testers were not a fan of this, and we brought the boss much lower.

Phase 2: Puzzle

A book cipher using the decrypted Norse family master message.

Teawrex enjoying himself!

Phase 3: Combat

This is where we got cute with combat. We used some fallen tech to split the arena in half and chose a boss that was able to teleport between the sections. The goal was to have players split up to defeat the boss if it teleported. Any time a servitor appeared with a wall we tied it to the wall so that killing it brought the wall down.

Phase 3: Puzzle

Key word cipher. The clue at the top of the monitor is a clue to the keyword which was “BALMUNG” a legendary sword.

Phase 4: Combat

We took the same concept from phase 3 combat and added mines! The mines needed to be diffused and the fireteam needed to split up in order to diffuse the mines on either side of the wall. They also needed to kill the boss. Some teams tried to do the mines first. Some teams tried to burn down the boss to bring down the wall and then tackle the mines. It was very interesting to see how teams strategized in this scenario.

Phase 4: Puzzle

We got cheeky with combat, so they knew we were going to get cheeky with the puzzles too! This is my second favourite puzzle phase!

We showed wings and the word “FLY”. The goal as the community found out was to shoot the words fly while in the air! I wish I had clips of this one. If anyone has any, please send them to me on twitter!

Phase 5: Combat

Mines and bosses. This one was a raw combat phase.

Phase 5: Puzzle

This is my other favourite puzzle! This one stumped the community for a bit, but they were able to solve it relatively fast! I’m so glad they did it worked out about as well as I could have hope for while designing it! The monitor showed this:

Teawrex and team seeing it for the first time

Which at first glance really doesn’t look like much. At this point people were just going into photoshop and trying to figure out if it was like the map and needed to be manipulated. Eventually they figured it out.

It’s a 3D maze! I actually had envisioned it and designed it in reverse order. Where you descend into the maze as if you were going deeper into Niobe’s Torment. The community is more of a glass half full kind of group!

Phase 6: Combat

Two walls! Splitting the arena into 3 parts. Two servitors and some Black Armory shield bosses! Throwing whatever we can at them!

Phase 6: Puzzle

The community had some fun with this infographic

Things got a little sidetracked on this one but they got it eventually!

Phase 7: Combat

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We threw everything at them. Two walls, this time perpendicular to each other and splitting the combat space into 4 parts. Mines. Shielded bosses. Bosses that spawned minions. A kitchen sink! Everything. After a few attempts they came out on top once again.

Side Note: I wanted to implement these as spinning walls, but we decided against it. I still feel spinning walls of death would have been so much fun!

Phase 7: Puzzle

However watching Gladd and his team beat it for the first time and seeing how excited he was was and how thankful he was to the puzzlers still made me feel fantastic.

Here is his final run in it’s entirety.

Niobe’s Torment Takeaways

Puzzle phases 6 and 7 didn’t go as planned. There were a lot of factors that worked against them. Fatigue was one. The community really wanted to get into the fourth forge and was growing tired after many unsuccessful attempts. Knowing content existed just waiting to be played becomes frustrating after a while.

Should we have had checkpoints per bypass? Maybe.

What we needed was a mechanism that prevented brute forcing but didn’t discourage experimentation on what the answers could be. The current punishing nature of the event discourages experimentation. So, I only say maybe to checkpoints because there may have been another way to solve this. However, checkpoints would have been better than nothing. It’s always better that someone solves your puzzle too fast.

The reason we decided against checkpoints was because we wanted it to be difficult. A challenge that required the help of the best of the best mechanical players. We also wanted to reduce brute forcing so each attempt had weight and thought behind it. However, like I said, this lead to people being very discouraged from trying themselves and weren’t willing to “waste” attempts they weren’t entirely confident in. In fact the community had the correct answer for awhile on puzzle 7 but weren’t confident enough to try it out. People tend toward loss aversion and we made a loss too punishing.

I believe puzzles 6 and 7 are also the ones we made the most design missteps on. Phase 6 needed something more than 3 trees in the glyph to show that 3 people should shoot the glyph. Phase 7 had more issues and just a lot surrounding it that can’t be talked about. I think ultimately, I take a lot of the blame for those ones falling short because they could have gone so well had I just caught those lapses earlier. Had I done so all the other issues wouldn’t have mattered because the designs would have been better.

I still want to point out that a lot of really great moments came from this I have so many good memories watching the community solve and work through the content. I have images saved and stored away. Clips and even some t-shirts! I’ll never forget the mistakes that were made, and I wouldn’t want to because they’ll make me a better game developer but there is also so much good surrounding it that it makes swallowing and accepting those mistakes much easier.

Some Extra Fun

We poked some fun at Rob because of these comments. I even got some shirts made!

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Some more amazing stuff from the community

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Conclusions

Being a part of this was an amazing experience for me. It is everything I love about game development. It’s taking a piece of yourself, infusing and molding it with your passion and then sending it off to a community saying, “I hope you like this!” and hoping they now understand you a bit better. It’s the only way I’ve ever known how to truly connect with others. I’m so thankful for everyone that trusted me to be a part of this and so absolutely floored by the community that participated in it!

P.S. I’m not sorry about the French cutlery!

Thanks for reading!