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Website
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Full Website
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Kepoco
Inspiration
After Playing games like Inscryption With a build in ARG and seeing them across the internet in videos like "searching for a world that doesn't exist" We got inspired to try make one of our own using the various mediums we know in order to create our own story about finding a piece of possessed technology.
What it an ARG
an ARG or an Alternate Reality Game is an interactive narrative that uses the real world in order to tell a story requiring players to solve puzzles across websites, games, social media, drives and sometimes even physical locations.
How we built it
We created our ARG by stringing together a websites, various Youtube videos, images, sound files, encrypted text, and a game on the Kepoco all connected by various code and links the player needs to uncover.
On the website side, it is powered by Spring Boot with Thymeleaf on the frontend to generate data from the backend for the ciphers, for example. In addition, all of the styling on the website is done with the Bootstrap CSS framework.
The Google drives were used to hold various different formats of files the player could utilize. the first one containing a diary that we would use to both explain some of the story for example what happened to the previous owner along with subtle hints to help people who may be lost. access to the next step was hidden though 3 different mediums the text file which contained a basic cipher, a sound file which had a spectrogram image that needed a special website to use. And an image which used near invisible text to hide morse code.
We further wanted to give information about the story and so used various youtube videos and posted them online with hidden links on the website and kepoco further explaining the story. We also used Elevenlabs in order to create voices for the antagonistic entity and the person who created the cursed game to begin with. giving more life to the story.
The game itself was made on the Kepoco, an altered raspberry Pi device, using the University of Kent's custom IDE. All of the code was written by hand into the special IDE and uploaded to the Kepoco's memory so it could be run independently. We utilised a save file system using file handling to make the game react to the solutions to other puzzles in real time, including having to replay the game again to see visible changes.
Challenges we ran into
Adding the ciphers to the website was a huge challenge, it required multiple external JavaScript libraries to function properly and generate the correct encrypted data. It was also hard to work out where to put appropriate hints that would still make it difficult to decide which content was part of the ARG clues and which were red herrings - sometimes the clues were vague purposefully. The biggest challenges on the Kepoco side of things was the device's limitations. With only a 72x40 pixel screen and 4 colours to work with, a lot of things, such as having the endings played on the Kepoco itself, sadly couldn't be done and a youtube video was used to supplement it.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We're proud of how well everything came together in the end, requiring a lot of coordination to ensure that each puzzle lead to the next. We're also proud of how hard we worked in the timeframe to pull together such a complex project.
What we learned
On the frontend site, we learnt a lot about generating content from the backend. Moreover, we discovered how ciphers can be calculated with JavaScript alone and without giving away the answer to the player.
We also learned about how to use eleven labs and how to create voices by using descriptions and then use audio tags in order to mould the voice to sound as we want when reading texts.
What's next for new Age
it would be great to extend upon the game and sites further allowing for more explanation and extension of the story while also introducing other new interesting mechanics and software for the user to use, such as editing the game files to uncover rooms, or getting them to find text embedded in the meta data of an image etc.
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