As part of the Mount Prospect Public Libraries 75th anniversary I created a Ready Player One event. We thought that this would be a good way to introduce our new VR (Oculus Rift) system as well as piggy back off the movie coming out. The first thought was to have an event where we did a scavenger hunt, next we thought about having a technology night where we showed off VR, some AR, and some retro 80’s gaming. What we came up with was bigger than both.
The planning started at the end of 2017. I met with some librarians and told them my ideas, they liked them and we got the ball rolling… then I started to have ideas. What if we turned the scavenger hunt into an online game, similar to the one in the book. Players would create accounts and earn points as they completed tasks. Those tasks would range from completing videos games, to answering trivia questions to finding 3d printed keys hidden throughout the library. This project was starting to get big.
Getting Started
The user starts out with an instructional page, for fun I made it look like an arcade machine complete with working buttons and coin return. (The coin return gave you a secret quarter). The design had to be somewhat simplistic as it had to be responsive.
The first task was War Games but you could jump quickly get on the score board by using the free code I provided, “gunter75”.
War Games
When you went to the War Games page you were greeted with a blank page with nothing but a logon prompt and a flashing cursor. It was a little more difficult than I had imagined to recreate this with a moving cursor in CSS, but I got the job done. The login was looking for “Joshua” the login from the movie War Games, but it also had some funny responses to other input including a secret code if you put in the name “Lucosia”. By Entering Joshua you were presented with the list of other tasks. To make sure that no one got stumped here if you entered five wrong guesses a hint prompt popped up that directed you to the answer.
Konami
The first task that I programmed was for the Konami code. I created a old NES controller in HTML/CSS/JS and waited for someone to input the correct code. If they did, a message would appear with a special code. This code would take them to the score screen where they would have a predetermined amount of points added to their score.
Other Tasks
The game had many tasks, getting to level five in space invaders.
Or beating the computer in a game of pong.
All the code for these tasks were either taken from open source projects or coded from scratch by me. I also created some offline parts of the game, a scavenger hunt took the player to all corners of the library looking for 3d printed keys with special codes on them. We ziptied the keys to their hiding places so that they didn’t disappear during the game.
The game went on for two weeks and in the end five player found all but 10 points, which was pretty impressive considering all the hidden points I had scattered around the library and website, remember that quarter, it had a secret code on it for 25 points. Everyone had a great time and we put up a large monitor with a arcade machine cut out around it so everyone could keep track of the scoreboard. In the end we had about 100 people on the scoreboard.
