Continuing all the way to the right brings us to the third and final prologue challenge with Poinsettia McMittens. Poinsettia asks us for help beating the Elf Minder 9000 game. The faster you do so the more points you get. Once again, I will cover the gold and silver medals.
Silver Medal
Similar to the previous challenge the silver medal can be achieved completely legitimately. Complete all 12 levels and you’ll unlock it but, just like last time, that’s not nearly as fun. This game has many different ways to break however, there are also a significant number of checks and balances to try and keep players from cheating. Below I will cover each of my solutions and, where relevant, break down how to replicate them.
No trickery in these first 3 just follow the paths.
Dune Dash makes use of the ability to rotate path pieces. Have the elf collect all the boxes then rotate the path so when he walks back he’s connected to the finish
Coral Cove is the first level where we need to start cheating. Much like we looked at in the previous challenge, browser dev tools are our friend here. Looking through the scripts for this game one of the first things that jumped out to me was guide.js and specifically the EntityTypes inside of it.
This contains all the different pieces that can be placed on the board and maps each one to a number. My first thought was simply to use the console to turn all the blocker’s into portals. This would remove them all from the map as no portals had been placed. I ran EntityTypes.BLOCKER = 6 and they all disappeard. I did it! Now all I had to do was draw the line from the start to the end and….
Crap… Looking back to the console gives us a hint as to what is going on.
We can see the player pick up the start, both crates but they cross through a blocker which triggers an Invalid game data error. What I ended up doing to get around this was to still use that same command to make the blockers disappear but instead of just ignoring them I used springs to jump over the rocks. While the rocks are visible the springs are unable to be placed but once they’ve been removed there is nothing stopping the player from adding these springs. This became a common strategy through the rest of these 12 challenges.
No real tomfoolery here just more path spinning
Spring trick used here to place it in the top left
Spring trick and path spinning used to get in, grab the crates, and hop back out
Multiple spring tricks
Spring trick once again
Spring trick used to close it out
Once the first 12 levels have been completed the Silver Medal will be unlocked and we’ll be prompted to try the secret 13th level A Real Pickle
Gold Medal
One of the first things I noticed when looking at this problem was the placement of the finish block. Even using the previous spring strategy I would have no way of going diagonal into the finish block. There was something I was missing that was needed to solve this challenge.
Going back to the drawing board I poured back over the code. I tried many different variations of my previous Entity manipulations to try and move the finish block but I could only ever duplicate it which would trigger a validation error. Eventually I had the idea to try and figure out how the entity and path data was being saved and I started looking at the Local Storage section of my dev tools.
This looks like a good place to start. Analyzing the information more it contains 2 arrays. The segments array is the start and end point for each line segment while entities is a 3 value array with the position followed by the entity type we were using earlier. My first attempt was to simply edit the line segments so I could just move diagonally and it seemed like this was going to work right up to the end when I got a validation error. I then tried using this to move the finish but, like I said earlier, there cannot be two finishes. What I ended up doing was editing the entity list to add a portal with the same coordinates as the finish block.
This is an extremely janky solution but it does work and is good enough for the gold medal.
Conclusion
This closes out the Prologue section of the game. I was able to complete all three challenges the first night and earned myself a nice 5th place on the board for doing so
At the time of writing the high score board has ballooned to a minimum of a 38 way tie for first place and I expect that pattern to continue through to Act III but until then I’m going to enjoy sitting on top. New challenges will already be out by the time this goes up and I’ll be posting those solutions as soon as the embargo lifts. Good luck and have fun.
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