Volta-hunt (Volta-jacht)

2026-09-01

At the introduction days at my study, I help organize for Volta. We did a game we called the Volta-hunt. The new students get a riddle and have to find the location related to the riddle. At the location they play a short game and get the riddle for the next location.

The first time I helped (2023), the person responsible for this game did not have a time schedule and not enough games prepared. So I finished their work last minute, luckily I managed to scramble enough games and write all the hints just in time. Besides some small issues that could be resolved while the game was playing. I did notice it is quite important all groups leave at the exact same time.

The next year (2024) I was responsible for Ele-Showt (another big event Volta organizes), so I wasn't responsible for any part of the introduction days. When Ele-Showt happened, I remembered that I made a timer app a long time ago, maybe I could make it work for the introduction days for the people at the locations for the Volta-hunt.

The timer was a web page, completely written in client-side JS, that was just counting down until the time people needed to switch. Sometimes simple apps can make a big difference. This timer was a great success.

Again, a year later (2025), I promoted myself to be responsible for the Volta-hunt. This time I put in the time to make this app more useful. It now also showed the group names that should be there. The players also had a view to see the riddles, and after a while it also showed an extra hint. This was the first year when there were no interceptions needed to get the games flowing.

The software wasn't really made to be easily reconfigurable, so for the next year (2026) I completely rewrote the system to a server-side Rust part that sends the current game state in JSON to the client and renders it to the screen.

This way I can have a lot more flexibility in how the configuration is done, and more importantly, I can add a clear error if the configuration is invalid.