Ancient Empires Solution

How It Works

As described earlier, there were four levels for the Zune platformer game. Each level supported 6 simultaneous players, and all but one required cooperation among all of the players to complete. The objective of the game was to collect a set number of artifacts, upon completion of which teams would get a 6 letter 'word'.

A shot of one of the Zunes in action

Solution

The words for solving each level were:

  • OSTNCU
  • OMEETE
  • NUIARO
  • WUTSAC
  • YBHWRH

Teams had to write these out in a list and reorder them to read the answer vertically down the columns:

NUIARO OSTNCU WUTSAC YBHWRH OMEETE

Doing this gave them "NOW YOU SUBMIT THE ANSWER CARTOUCHE"

Notes

The inspiration for this game started with one of Ben's favorite games as a kid, Super Solvers Challenge of the Ancient Empires. The original game (which was released in 1991) was a single player platformer game with lots of logic puzzles within caverns from four ancient civilizations.

Based on this core idea, we developed a concept of a collaborative platformer where teams would have to work together to solve logic puzzles within the levels. The game was originally going to be written in WPF, projected in each room and controlled with infrared remote controls. When we received advance word that the XNA Game Studio SDK for Zune was going to be announced, we applied for the internal dogfood and began developing the puzzle for that platform instead. (The WPF codebase lived on as the level editor...)

Special thanks to the Zune team for helping us out by loaning devices – without their assistance, this puzzle would not have been possible.

Trivia: In the beta, you could actually die � and when you died, your entire team was forced to restart. To make things worse, we included a level called "Jagged Snake Junction" featuring a variety of borderline unfair platform game tricks similar to those found in the Internet sensation "I Wanna Be The Guy". The unanimous verdict from our beta teams was that this was not our best idea from a level design perspective.

The beta also included another element from the original game – a jigsaw puzzle that revealed a photographic artifact for each level. The feedback from the beta was that this wasn't particularly interesting and so we cut it in favor of the stacked-words answer mechanic we used in the Game – but I'll never forget the eerie sound of six silent players pressing clicky Zune buttons to solve a jigsaw puzzle.

The original game's soundtrack consisted of tunes derived from classical music. The soundtrack playing in the rooms for the game included music by Brahms and Erik Satie in tribute to the original – as well as a few other pieces of music that were theme appropriate. It made my day when one team at the Fission Mailed metaplayer was still humming a few bars of one of the songs...

The game controls were assigned to the device buttons by Shane, the primary dev for the game. He happens to be left handed. Sorry we never got around to implementing righty flip...