Randolph W. Akeley’s Logbook
Howdy, diggers! It’s Teemu (teimou on discord) the VR marketing manager. At the bottom of this post, you can find a rundown of the whole campaign if that’s what you’re looking for! Before we go any further, I just want to say for the rest of you maniac miners that there aren’t any clues in this blog post. Certainly no discord commands.
Randolph W. Akeley’s Logbook was a community driven event / marketing campaign / ARG (Alternative Reality Game) throughout the summer of 2022, in which we would share different kinds of content containing clues and hints on multiple channels. These clues would include hidden information about the next clues, as well as hints about the upcoming full release of the game.
The idea of doing an ARG has popped to my mind from time to time in the past years, but this time we had a chance to actually try if it would work. The timing was perfect as we were getting close to finishing the full release content of the game, but we hadn’t released any actual information about the fourth biome (B4) and it’s lore. ARG would be a perfect way to build hype and drop hints about the B4, as well as engage with our community on a steady basis. We had also just hired Jack, our new community manager, so in that sense the timing was also perfect.
Designing the campaign
As we’ve never designed ARGs before, and only partially took part in some ARG’s ourselves, we wanted to keep it very simple. Giving enough time after each drop to see if it was too easy or too difficult so that we could anticipate what was going to happen next. Also we still had to do our other day-to-day tasks so we couldn’t spend all of the time just doing this, although the marketing team truly wished we could.
First we laid out the general timeline and number of posts, what would be the end goal and how would we get people noticing this. Also brainstorming about random ideas we could use, as well as some obstacles and risks that might come our way during it.
This is how our original Miro board planning for the campaign looked like. So many unused ideas.
Then we moved to designing the details of each drop and how each of them would relate to the next one. We left some room for us here to be able to change plans during the campaign, in case some of the content would end up being too heavy to produce in time, or if a certain type of clue would be too difficult to figure out. We decided to have a total of 5 drops, although we had to make some side content on discord for the community to reach the next clue.
Each of the five drops would include the following:
- The timing of the next drop
- Clue where the next drop will be posted
- A digit for the code to get the final in-game reward
One core point of the whole thing was to engage with the community, mostly on the discord server, but also connecting other channels with the discord people. I think we got quite a few new members on discord thanks to the ARG. Great success! Anyways, we wanted to make the investigation a bit like secret book club, so we made a hidden channel and a separate “Investigator” role for the people who would figure out the first clue. Then the investigators could talk about their findings and figure out the clues together. We also had #the-logbook channel on discord where we would post additional hints and clues when needed.
Difficulties
Some clues were more difficult or more easy than we anticipated. We had to give extra hints quite a few times, and then again sometimes the investigators solved the clue so fast that they had to wait for a long time for the next one, because we were still working on it. For example the blog post clues were solved like within 30 minutes. On hindsight it would’ve been nice if we were able to give access to the next part immediately after the previous clue was solved. I think next time we’ll try to do it like that!
The original plan was to include those 3 above mentioned pieces of information, it was especially difficult to include the digit in the audio file one. I mean, Akeley says “kay?” in the end, which was supposed to be “K” as the digit, but it’s obvious that it breaks the pattern too much. However as there were only 5 digits to unlock the final reward, in the end we realized that if people had the four other digits, they could just bruteforce the solution quite easily.
Conclusion
Discord engagement went up a lot, and according to the feedback, many people really enjoyed taking part in this. I count that as a win, but probably within our team, the biggest win was that we really enjoyed planning this and following how the investigators were solving the clues one by one! We will definitely look for opportunities to do this again in the future and with the lessons learnt in this one, we’ll be able to make it even better! Also huge thanks to everyone in the marketing, dev, art and audio teams who helped us out!
The amount of messages in the past 28 days shows the effect a campaign like this can have!
Post rundown
The first post
The first drop was posted on multiple channels. The clue was for people to go to discord and use the command !investigate. That would trigger the bot with a message and we would then give the users the investigator role, which would allow them to access the hidden channels. The digit to unlock the in-game reward can be found in the bottom of the post: P
The Audio Message
Then there was the audio file on the discord channel with a bit of a lore written by our game designer AMP and me, read by AMP and then edited by Antti, our audio designer. The backwards part in the end included the clue, for people to go to our Twitter and TikTok channels and to wait for the next post. Akeley says “kay?” in the audio file and that was supposed to be “K” for the final in-game reward code. I think nobody got that? Not surprising as it broke the pattern quite a bit.
Twitter & TikTok video
The Twitter and TikTok posts would include a video with some flash frames. A QR code leading to the next post. Here we also had a small hiccup as the reward digit “Y” was supposed to be in the post copy instead of the video, but that wasn’t first posted. As most people didn’t check the TikTok, we reposted it there later with the letter and then kinda nudged the investigators to the right direction.
DevBlog
Next up was the blog post. We figured we’d make the blog password protected and share the password two letters at a time, and as an anagram on the discord channel. The anagram said AWRYLEEK, which could be rearranged into RWAKELEY. In the blog post there were hidden binary codes, which were found super quickly. The binaries told the investigators to use the first letter of every second paragraph in the post. That would give them a new discord command and then they would get a youtube link to a premiere video. The reward digit in a discord bot message: G.
Youtube premiere
A backlash appears as we had to move our original planned release date and that was already included in the Eerie ruins teaser video, which was the final clue drop. We had to repost it and share a new link in discord. Not a major issue luckily. We were also able to include the release date in the in-game reward (check the bottom of the golem statue). In the video description you can find the final reward digit, R.
Miner’s greetings,
Teimou
My construction abilities are being questioned as I screwed one of the new desks into the floor.