Hacker Quest

Hacker Quest is a cooperative location based scavenger hunt where you must build new connections with other hackers and explore MIT in order to solve puzzles, takedown bugs, and SAVE THE HACK!

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Inspiration

The project is inspired by Hollywood Hacking trope, where hackers would use neon monitors and salad of sophisticated words to break into security systems in minutes. The second source of inspiration for Hacker Quest was the crash of the highly advertised Destiny sorting system on the very first day of its work. The initial idea of the project was the hacking-themed scavenger hunt that would play on these two tropes while also helping hackers socialize and get used to navigating around MIT.

What it does

Hacker Quest is an AR scavenger hunt game focused around the MIT buildings. The players can access the game from a browser, and will need to input passwords that are based on MIT- and hackathon-themed riddles, as well as complete combat encounters with bugs in order to complete the game. The game consists of two separate quest lines. The first one is focused on navigating around MIT and completing challenges bound to specific terminals around the university. The second one involves achieving passwords from hackers of all six tracks within the hackathon. Upon completion of both quest lines, the player manages to successfully “save the crashed system” and win the game.

How we built it

We used Midjourney to create the 2D art for the NPCs. We walked around the MIT campus to scout out suitable locations for terminal hacking puzzles. Then we assembled the questline using EarthMMO Studio. We created a custom 3D bug enemy model to use in a kill quest using Blender, Substance 3D and Procreate.

Challenges we ran into

The weather was cold and rainy the entire week, which discouraged people from exploring the campus. The ice-breaker quest we designed requires talking to each hacker to tell them their “purpose password”, which is very inefficient - it would have been great to coordinate with the organizers to relay this information through the realityhack.world website. Technical issues involved minor production mistakes: the encounters would appear to be moving and attacking players sideways despite playing with rotation coordinates during export. Aside from this, it took a moment to figure out narrative writing to ensure it is concise.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We designed and built the questline in a day and a half, and had plenty of time to market it to hackers and get some sleep!

What we learned

People generally avoid reading, and would skip dialogues to get to the gameplay. In addition to this, we have learned the way to store multiple animations in Blender at the same time, and practiced Midjourney prompt engineering to make it drastically more precise. Aside from this, we have managed to achieve a pretty polished vertical slice of the project in a brief period of time, which gave us a good grasp of what is possible within the two-day hackathon.

What's next for Hacker Quest

We will continue to create more immersive storylines for live events on the EarthMMO platform! Follow our progress at our Discord

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