I'm sure many of y'all have been eagerly awaiting today. I didn't get as many entries as I hoped but this was the first of many Game Jam's I'll be hosting so maybe some creators got nervous. Please don't be I look at everyone's entry. So who won? Who got the spotlight.

https://thejourney.neocities.org/

Welcome to the Journey. Created by Cyrus and Selene of CandSProductions. A harmless website at first glance, but one peek at the source code and we've got ourselves a Vignere cipher. And OH BOY does Regular like himself a Vignere cipher. Of the big name ciphers, we see rather inefficiently thrown about here this is one that I particularly like especially due to the lack of it being used. Similar to a Caesar cipher, Vignere uses a passphrase to unlock itself meaning this creator is about to send us on a code hunt to find the passphrase. Some careful combing brings us the password . We discover a phrase and then a single statement at the bottom mysticism. Put that into a Neocities URL and we get:

This continues on and on and even I'm not done getting through all the sites but I wanted to leave it that way before I decided to announce a spotlight winner. Why is the ARG interesting though? I've given you a small peek at it but why did I LIKE IT? Well, it had exactly what I wanted from this first Game Jam. The perfect mix of puzzle and story. While the end of this said story isn't yet clear to me I still have enjoyed what I have so far. It's mysterious and keeps you going with every Vignere we solve. While I'm a large advocate of not locking a game behind an initial cipher I will give this one a pass because of how the journey unfolds almost episodically. It makes sense for this sort of format. Coming from someone who despises big cipher ARG's take this as a major compliment. You tickled my fancy Cyrus and Selene. You've made a puzzle-centric ARG that for the first time in quite literally years I've enjoyed. With that, I say congratulations on securing the bag on this first Game Jam. Hopefully, I see more of you two in the future and I'd love to talk personally with you both about what you've made.

And with that the first r/ARG Game Jam is over. I loved everything I saw and don't worry next week there will be another Game Jam up and ready to receive submissions. All the entries were amazing and this next game jam will be an opportunity for ongoing ARG's to get that EPIC SPOTLIGHT ROYALE! With that, your friendly neighborhood interdimensional writer takes off to drink a coffee. If you are interested in reading the first game's post please refer to the following link: https://www.reddit.com/r/ARG/comments/b3gjyd/arg_game_jam_showdown_3202019/