After the success of my Ready Player One project the library decided that we should do a spiritual successor. I thought about different ideas, but settled on a mystery. Like RPO this would have both a digital and a physical component. I liked the idea of not going to far away from the things that worked last time, only with a new theme; but I knew that we could make improvements, including making the digital part mobile friendly. I worked on the project for about 6 months and was all ready to go when Covid hit. We decided to push back the launch, then we pushed it back some more, I used the time to make a few more improvements, then with everything else the project got abandon. We weren’t going to have any in-house programs for the foreseeable future. So while I won’t spoil anything incase we ever do want to use it, here is the whodunit interactive library mystery.
You start by going to the signup page. You can’t tell in this picture but there is animated fog that rolls in over the header to set the mood.
After that, you were free to tackle the mysteries in any order you liked. Each mystery you solved would give you points as well as reveal a clue as to who, where, and with what the mystery happened. These clues were added to your database records so that you didn’t have to keep track of them yourself but could reference them in your digital casebook.
There were also 3D printed “artifacts” that were hidden around the library, these artifacts had codes on the bottom of them that gave you points and helped narrow down your clues like the online mysteries. To help patrons, 3D representations were show on the artifacts page that they could spin and look at. I used the three.js library to help bring these to life.
A digital scoreboard was available to show everyone how they were doing and in what place they were.
The top three scores were going to win mystery themed prize baskets with books and food. There are also more hidden surprises and easter eggs hidden throughout but I won’t spoil them here. Last but not least here is the commercial that we made to promote the project.