Electron's Log | Devpost

Prologue

Electron De La Scoop was a cyborg, a villain, and my brother. We didn't have the best relationship (he once kidnapped me and took me to the moon) but he was still my brother. However, I noticed that after that very incident, he wasn't himself at all, and my fears were sadly true. That was when Electron died.

Upon his death, he left me 7 entries in his memory retrieval system, each encoded in ciphers and puzzles, and he claimed that solving each of the entries would help me somehow. I enlisted the help of some of my fellow Blahaj Gangers who helped me uncover the full truth. This website is a remnant of the past, and a chance for you to explore Electron's Log, too...

Vikram De La Scoop (PoopDeLaScoop#7482)

Inspiration 🧩🎮⚡✈

I was always fond of riddles, puzzles, and escape rooms since I was 8. In fact, I was once so passionate about riddles that I gave a speech about them in a primary school public speaking competition. Word puzzles, number puzzles, riddles, and everything in between provided me a chance to exercise my critical thinking capabilities, and it was so satisfying when you crack the code, find the answer, or put that last piece of the jigsaw in place. This all culminated when I first discovered ARGs.

I was first introduced to the concept of an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) when one of my favorite YouTube Creators (MatPat from Game Theory, Film Theory, and Food Theory) announced that he was creating one. I thoroughly enjoyed playing through this ARG and the various types of puzzles which included ciphers and hidden messages in almost every file type imaginable. This was an incredible experience, but after it ended, I didn't think about ARGs for a while.

That was until I did the MLH USAF challenge which renewed my interest in steganography and cryptography, and hidden messages, in general. Furthermore, I heard from a friend that they were planning to create an ARG, which reminded me of the awesomeness of these games, and inspired me to create my own.

I got my brother Electron De La Scoop onto the Blahaj Gang Discord server where he kidnapped me, took me to the moon, and put a series of puzzles that the Blahaj Gangers had to solve to rescue me.

⚡He also talked with zap emojis like this⚡

To improve on the character of Electron, I started designing a better ARG with better puzzles with the help of some friends who also shared my passion for ARGs, who tested it and made the website.

What it does ⚡🎮🧩👨‍💻

Message 01: [Post-Death Procedure Activated]
Code-Name: "The Game is Afoot"

⚡ Thank you for activating my memory retrieval system. Each log is locked behind a password that has been set by Electron. You shall get clues to unlock these logs. There are 7 in total, and each will reveal more about Vikram and me. This is of extreme importance, especially for Vikram. Thank you. ⚡

[Message End]

Decode ciphers, discover hidden messages, edit images, manipulate URLs, dissect audio, and more to get the passwords to each of Electron's Logs to uncover the truth about Vikram and his brother. Players start with the first puzzle, each of which is presented in a classic terminal and has a link to a Google Drive containing all the clues necessary to arrive at the final solution. For each of the 7 total puzzles you solve, you unlock a new log entry which will explain a little more each time. Also, you can log in to save your progress!

How we built it 🏗🔧🔨🔩⛏⚒🛠⚙🧰

We used the LEGENDARY MERN STACK for the base of our project. We first MongoDB and Mongoose for our ORM, then ExpressJS as our server. We used ReactJS and Tailwind CSS for our frontend and NextJS as a Server-Side Rendering framework.

Using Linode's one-click stack scripts, we deployed a VPS with MongoDB and then, hosted our backend on it. We also used GitHub actions with our repository to make integration with Linode possible via git actions. We also used Twilio's API to create passwordless yet secure authentication, so people could save their progress. Lastly, we got the custom domain http://log-of-emin.us (because e minus is an electron haha) thanks to the GoDaddy Registry and the custom domain http://electrons-log.tech/ from Domain.com.

The puzzles also took some time to make because we wanted to deviate a little from traditional ARG puzzles, and be more creative. The last puzzle (SPOILER ALERT!) has steganography but with the twist of a Sudoku puzzle with (you guessed it) another twist! We wanted more twists than a Christopher Nolan movie in both the story and the puzzles which we definitely achieved.

Challenges we ran into 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️

Puzzle Testing

While testing our game this weekend, we noticed an error in the first puzzle that would literally mean that nobody could play the rest of the game. However, we later fixed it but had to redesign an entire part of the puzzle to do so.

Deploys

We wanted to make it easier to deploy our hack because it was very inconvenient to have to redeploy manually after every small optimization or change to fix a bug we found during testing. Therefore, we used GitHub Actions to integrate with Linode's easy auto-deploy and have our project deploy automatically when pushed on the production branch.

School Stuff

We're a team of high schoolers and late Jan/early Feb is a very annoying period of time. We all had big projects that we had to work on that affected our final grade, so we were very limited on the time we could spend. Despite that, we came up with an extremely polished project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🏆🥇

Overcoming our challenges

We had a lot of work (and lack of sleep), but despite that, we managed to come up with an awesome hack!

Making a Whole ARG 😳

An ARG usually takes a long time to pull off. Well, much longer than a few days. We made an ARG in such a short time with a dynamic website and a beautiful and on-theme UI, and we are very proud of that.

What we learned 🧠🧠

Themed UIs

We learned a lot about design and color theory through some videos we watched. Additionally, the terminal design for the UI looks awesome and is something that we learned how to make this weekend. We can use our learnings to create similar UIs because of how well it turned out.

Auto-Deploying with Linode

We have used Linode in the past, but haven't used Linode and GitHub Actions to auto-deploy. This makes things so easy, we're sure to be using this in the future.

Making ARG Puzzles

Testing these puzzles helped us get a sense of the "perfect" level of difficulty for ARG puzzles. We would sometimes create one-step puzzles which were too easy and solved in a minute, however, we would also create some puzzles which were nearly impossible to solve. Through this process, we got a grasp on how to make puzzles with a good level of difficulty.

What's next for Electron's Log ⏭⏭

We want to eventually add some sort of hint system which we weren't able to decide on how to implement during this time. This would enable a slightly better user experience as instead of giving up, users could just wait for some hints.