Wallace Breen / Research Log 14 - Half Life Short
This was another great attempt at storytelling and expansion on Marc Laidlaw's Epistle 3, in which I started experimenting with the narrative that Breen's team was well aware of the powers, or potential mystery behind the Shu'ulathoi, and were tasked by the combine to further understand their written language, which I gauged gave them some sort of intrinsic power. This was meant to be the first of 3 logs, which offered 3 separate scientists perspectives on this research project. I retained the RS-09 reference several times during this breengrub.com project as I had intended to have a research facility in the further shorts, but before development got too far on that I made the decision to end the project in favor of beginning a project in the actual direction of game development.
This video does serve as a good test of designing puzzle elements though. A lot of alternate reality games I feel have issues with puzzle design and delivery, using generic binary or ciphers and I wanted to present something visually appealing, but conceal a secret if some folks looked a bit further and chose to see beyond what was shown. Thats where the direct requirement for a 6 digit code on the site came in. Discover a need for a cdoe through natural progression, and begin to backtrack and figure out how this information could have been presented in a way that was not expected. In all reality it was a simple, but unique way to hide a puzzle piece.