I've put it off for a while, but alas there's only so long you can spend in education before people start to notice the wrinkles, and thus I've finally been forced to step out into the Real World and apply for Real Jobs. Given the current job climate, (i.e. ten gazillion applicants for each position,) applying for graduate level jobs now tends to involve little online tests and puzzles to try and attract the right sort of people, and weed out some of the weaker applicants without requiring human intervention. After doing a few of these, I've decided that they're actually kinda fun, so I thought I'd make a bit of a game of it.

I've created a puzzle of my own, of a similar type to those I've had so much fun solving recently. If you visit here you will find one image and one sound file. Hidden away within each is half of a gift code for my favorite GOG of all time, so you'll have to solve both of them to get it. Be warned: Although they aren't impossible, (or even particulaly tough, compared to some I've seen,) they certainly aren't trivial. A decent level of IT knowledge and a good chunk of free time is required for both.

If there's enough interest I may make a series of it, with better prizes. Until then, for those of you who are into this sort of thing, enjoy! :)

Definitely devious, and very intriguing. Sadly also outside the scope of my available free time. I can tell this would take me ages to figure out, and I'd probably need to find special software for both halves of the task as well. I can certainly not get anything sensible out of either half with the methods I've tried so far.

Thumbs up for the puzzle and the giveaway though :-)

Just out of curiosity, what game is it?

Given the way he phrased it, I gather he means it to be a surprise.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!!!!!!!111!!!1!!!1!!!!ELEVEN!!!11!!

I think it's safe to assume that Licurg already has that ;-)

hehe, but one can never have too many copies of a good game!


In any case, I'll leave it a day or two before giving any serious clues out, but for now, I'll just say that you probably wont get anything out of it with steganography tools and that it'll require you to write some code of your own. (albeit not a huge amount) Also, I've tried to design it such that when you do come across anything that's relevent for the puzzle, it should immediately stand out.

After numerous headpounding, his better be a good game...

Or, if this is the easier sort of puzzles, the job market is worse than I thought.

Don't even know where to start.... (well, supposedly I should start with the pic... ;p)

I don't even know what steganography is :-/ (Well, I do now, because I just googled it)

And the code I usually write is either SQL or common garden-variety website backend code. I've never fiddled with image analysis or anything of that sort, so I'm out of my league here.

I'm absolutely convinced I've cracked it so I'll just post the solution here:

IT'S A TREE

Gimp 2.66 crashed when I tried to do anything to that tree, gimp 2.82 works buy I'm still not sure what sets of filters I should use.

Not in (as I've no idea how to solve it), but thanks and +1 for your generosity, timeslip!

Also, a little promotion in the giveaways' listing thread:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/how_does_one_make_a_gift_aka_gifting_on_gog_for_dummies/post473

Thank you for the giveaway :)

Please wait a little before giving hints (a week or so)
because I haven't much free time to spend, but would like to try solving it.