The following is an overview of my key efforts and developments thus far.
First, sketched out the box and its contents. There's a puzzle within a puzzle here, as I needed to figure out what the puzzles and mysteries inside might look like before I could even solve them. It helped to write out the stages in which I imagined parts of the artifact might come into play, and why. The branching game flow map to the right is a theory I had, and while some core components still linger, I suspect it isn't quite accurate.
It took a lot out of me to figure everything out. By the end, I had some weird monstrosity of a game built from the found artifact and my own theories. I can't help but notice some of my original ideas about making a STEAM game persisted here. Is it because I put too much of myself in the recreation, or do the Drifters and I have similar goals? Before I could dive into that, I needed to know if what I had could actually be played. Were the puzzles solvable? The flow understandable? So, a few months ago I built what I could out of cardboard to prototype and got some friends to test play what I had compiled so far.
Once I determined I had a basic understanding of the "game flow" of the artifact (as I grew increasingly certain this was some sort of game), I began to work on some of the specifics.
It was around this time I began to have dreams about this artifact. I dreamt of colors and lights, and when I awoke I had a notion of how to start building what I saw. Of course, I don't know the true technology the box contains, but I was able to start recreating what I saw using an Arduino, buttons, potentiometer, and a short string of individually addressable LEDs.
