And also, I was strongly influenced by the series of The Myst games. It’s a franchise centred on a series of adventure video games, where you travel by solving puzzles.
The website’s artistic part was designed in 3D Max and developed with Adobe Flash technology. Fun fact: The first programming language I learned was ActionScript.
The Puzzle
youtube: G9WTTKaJKQ0
The quest starts in “POWER STATION” where you have to enable the electricity in the city. Once that’s set, you use the same top view of the city and navigate to the skyscraper district.
“The Skyscraper” puzzle
You’ll find the first puzzle there, which prompts you to highlight only those buildings whose letters make a word - EDGESIN. Sounds easy, but it’s not. When you press any letter, it selects only adjacent letters relative to the pressed letter. If the adjacent letter is already highlighted, it switches back to the default state.
Once, that’s completed, you will have to navigate back to the power station and enable the power grid for one of the next quests.
“4 gallons of water” puzzle
To unlock the Resume part, you’ll have to complete the “4 gallons of water” quest which I’ve borrowed from the “Die Hard 3” movie. You have a 3-gallon and a 5-gallon jug - and a single fountain. Your goal is to fill the 5-gallon jug with 4 gallons of water.
“Scales” puzzle
But for the Portfolio section, you’ll have to complete the “Scales” puzzle. It’s similar to the water gallon quest, but this time you’ll have to make X, Y, Z-axis (or “jugs”) at equal weight.
The final quest - “Power Station” (optional).
You’ll have to go back to the power station and adjust the power grid based on the previous quest power consumption rate. The consumption rate was visible when you switched between quests. Reward: Master Key for instant content unlock of the portfolio site.
Frankly, I’m impressed by my performance 15 years ago. I wouldn’t be shy about such a website even nowadays.
R.I.P. Flash ActionScript, and bye-bye flash game development.
A year later the iOS app store was released, which meant the beginning of the “slow death” of Flash applications (as iOS didn’t have an intention to support Flash). So I slowly packed my bags and moved towards the demand of web application development using PHP and Mysql.
