Hooray! I’ve finally been doing this long enough to be able to make a classic “ate pie” pun! I probably wouldn’t have expected to keep making hunts for this long when I started. I’m 24 now, so that means I’ve been doing this for a whole 1/3 of my life! (Well technically, my life hasn’t been exactly an integer number of years long, so that denominator should really be a number slightly larger than 3… and speaking of numbers slightly larger than 3:)
The Greek letter directly after omicron is pi, so now that the omicron wave seems to have mostly subsided (speaking optimistically), that means it’s time for Pi Day! I much prefer pi-related sinusoidal waves to the omicron sinus-related wave.
P.I.HUNT 8 is jigsaw puzzle themed. I’ve found it funny that the canonical icon for puzzles seems to be a jigsaw puzzle piece, and googling “puzzle” returns almost entirely results about jigsaws, yet puzzle hunts rarely have jigsaws in them at all.
Actually, when I say “P.I.HUNT 8 is jigsaw puzzle themed”, I actually mean “P.I.HUNT 8 is a jigsaw”! The original plan was going to be to laser cut it and have a physical jigsaw (which is why everything in the hunt was made with vector graphics), but that ended up being expensive, and I’d like to keep P.I.HUNT as a free thing to play. Plan B was going to be using some online collaborative site like Google Jamboard, but each one I looked at lacked some feature that was important (e.g. in Google Jamboard, you can’t select multiple pieces at once, which is extremely important for solving a jigsaw puzzle.)
I ended up making a multiplayer Unity game, which is what’s linked below. There’s also a MANUAL.txt which I highly recommend reading through the entirety of. I think solving with a team would be fun (but it’s still optional, of course) partially because the puzzles skew somewhat harder than normal, but also because jigsaw puzzles are always fun to do collaboratively ๐
This program was a major last-minute hacky operation, and I’m a little worried about it totally breaking. I’ve never made a game that requires connecting through the internet before, and multiplayer netcode is always scary, but hopefully it goes well! If you want to tell me bugs, or have other things you want to say, you can email me at jack[dot]l[dot]lance[at]gmail[dot]com or on Discord as Jack Lance#3467. (I like to hear from people, which is why I’ve used email for answer checking in the past, but it turns out I’m bad at responding to emails and making people wait for a response before they can continue a hunt feels bad.)
One last thing: I included a build for Mac because Unity has an option to make a build for Mac, so hopefully everything just automatically works, but I’ve only tested it on PC. (EDIT: One solver just told me that it originally didn’t work, but they got it to work by running chmod +x PIHUNT.app/Contents/MacOS/Pi in the terminal, and another says a more user-friendly way to open the application on Mac would be to right-click the application, click Show Package Contents, click MacOS, then click that file. If it gives a warning, go to System Preferences > Security and Privacy and allow it to open.)
ERRATUM: The piece that says “1B” on it is an error. When you see this piece, you can cross out the “1B” on it.
P.I.HUNT 8