More than half of our Hack Night badges are “the best badge we’ve ever made”. We say this about so many of our badges that the phrase has become a meme among Hack Night regulars, and an expectation of future badges: given four badges, you can expect two or three of them to be “the best badge we’ve ever made”.

But on September 20th, we outdid ourselves so hard that it deserves its own entry in Purdue Hackers lore. The Hack Night 5.3 badge is the best badge we’ve ever made, by quite a long shot, and it’s emblematic of what makes Purdue Hackers so special today.

What are badges?

Every Friday we run Hack Night, our weekly hacker festival with 80 students building creative projects. Hack Night begins at 8pm and ends when the last person leaves—often at 6am or later.

Every Hack Night includes an associated laser-cut collectible that we make & give to every attendee for free. Each “badge” is engraved with the Hack Night version & date, and can only be earned by coming to its associated Hack Night.

Every badge is a labor of love. We begin a week and a half before its associated Hack Night by brainstorming a theme—e.g. “desert”, “slime”, “flat earth”. From there, we source & order material—usually acrylic sheets of a color that matches the theme. We then spend days creating an intricate vector design, often doing more than one iteration. Finally, we laser cut 80-100 ~2-inch badges out of our material at the Bechtel Center, Purdue’s free makerspace for students, in a process that takes 2-3 hours.

We’ve done all this every week, never missing a week, since Hack Night 1.0 in November 2022. And they keep getting better: since we began making badges two years ago, we’ve learned what works, gotten more creative with our themes, and encouraged designs from community members. Longtime Hack Night regulars have large collection of badges, and many of our alumni have brought their collections to their new homes.

The Hack Night 5.3 badge

A typical badge is one design from which we make 80 copies. But we’ve strayed from this norm before: the badges for Hack Nights 3.2, 3.11, 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5 all had more than one version.

For Hack Night 5.3, we decided to take this idea even further: a badge that has 7 versions which, when put together, reveal a message to be decoded, kicking off a scavenger hunt.

Creating the badge

We began brainstorming ideas for the Hack Night 5.3 badge a week and a half before the event, scheduled for September 20th. We went in knowing we wanted it to be some kind of a puzzle, but didn’t know anything beyond that yet.

Immediately, people proposed variations of hexagonal tiling:

Then we brainstormed what a puzzle in this format would look like. The first idea was numbers: what if each badge contained a few seemingly meaningless numbers that gained meaning when you put them together?

We settled on ASCII codes that spelled out a message when all badges were put together. But that didn’t feel like enough: hiding a message in its ASCII representation is an old trick that we expected many players to figure out. We wanted the message to fill the whole badge, feel alien, and be beautiful enough for each badge to stand on its own without the scavenger hunt.

This turned us toward the “vine script”:

The Spoken Language Circle, which Ayden facilitates at every Hack Night at 9pm, has been developing a writing system based on vines with leaves and berries—and they had recently made great progress. It’s still far from being “production-ready”, but we nevertheless felt like it was a perfect fit for the badge.

By this point, we had settled on 7 versions of a badge, each hexagonal-shaped and tiled into a honeycomb. Once fully assembled, players would notice two things: a winding vine, with leaves and berries, running across every badge, spelling out a message; and two to three ASCII codes on each badge, which altogether would spell out another message.

Finally, we wondered, what should the two messages be? We turned to an unrelated project Hazel has been developing over the last couple months, a key component of which is a modded rotary phone.

What if this rotary phone were the final step in the scavenger hunt? The ASCII codes could spell out a URL whose website contains the key for decoding the vine script, as well as a text input for the final answer to the scavenger hunt. The message in the vine could tell players to find the rotary phone, which we would hide somewhere in the building, and dial a number. Once players dialed the right numbers, they would be patched into the “Evil Purdue Hackers” universe, where two people are discussing the projects Evil Hack Night attendees are building.

With this, Sean created a final design, filling in the vine and rotating some of the badges to make them a little harder to assemble.

Can you figure out the message in the vine? All the information you need to solve it is in the design itself. We’ll reveal the answer in the next section.

The Wednesday before Hack Night, we laser cut the badges out of yellow mirrored acrylic.

Soon after, Jack and Matthew recorded the message to be played on the phone. Meanwhile, Hazel used ElevenLabs to create a password prompt, then edited both files and loaded them into the phone.

Finally, Jack designed & printed tickets, which those who made it all the way to the end could redeem for a free Insomnia cookie.

The final scavenger hunt

Imagine you are a Hack Night attendee showing up to Hack Night 5.3. First, you receive a badge, just like at every Hack Night—except at this one, your badge is one of 7 variations. If you put all 7 together in the correct way, the fully-assembled puzzle reveals two messages: one in the form of a vine, with leaves and berries, running through every badge; and one in the form of seemingly random numbers, of which every badge contains 2 or 3.

The seemingly random numbers are actually ASCII codes arranged randomly; if you turn each code into its character representation, you may recognize that you’re looking at a scrambled URL. Putting it together reveals it to be puhack.horse/53.

If you visit this URL, you’ll find a website which contains instructions for decoding the vine, a message about “the password” being at the top of the page, and a question “Where do the creations belong?” with a text input.

Using the instructions at the top, mapping each of the leaves on the vine to their character representations, you find the message in the vine is ROTARY PHONE 310685. At this point, it’s time to find the rotary phone hidden somewhere in the venue.

Once you find it, you pick it up and dial 310685. The phone begins to ring, then a demonic voice asks, “Please enter the password.”

If you dial 53—recall that the website says “The password is at the top of this website”—the message from Evil Purdue Hackers begins playing.

This message is two of its members discussing projects folks are building in that universe: passports except you get deported from Hackerland if you don’t have one, the door closer, and the torment nexus. Near the end, the two members remark that these projects should be in a gallery.

If you recognize this as the answer to the question on the website, and enter it into the form, the website turns green and asks you to ask an organizer for a ticket, which you’ll exchange for a cookie.

Day Of

Hack Night 5.3 began on Friday, September 20th, at 8pm. 72 people were there at the peak, with over 80 attendees throughout the course of the event.

Anticipating that people may have trouble getting started—which requires finding 6 other people with all the other variations of the badge—we planned a 10pm Session where we would gather folks to put their badges together. But we set up the phone at the start of Hack Night, so folks could get started whenever they wanted if they found a group.

The first group solved the scavenger hunt at around 9:15, just over an hour into Hack Night. This inspired other groups to start, boosted by the 10pm Session.

By the time 0~0~0 hit, about 20 people had solved the scavenger hunt. These people redeemed their tickets and placed their order for an Insomnia cookie, which we picked up 30 minutes later.

Magnum Opus

The amount that went into making this badge is staggering: days of collective brainstorming & designing of a scavenger hunt, acquiring & modding a rotary phone, recording & editing audio clues, designing a highly complex badge that both beautifully revealed the scavenger hunt while allowing each piece to stand on its own. The creativity, energy, and technical abilities required to do all this within one week did not exist in Purdue Hackers a year ago.

And none of it would have happened without the structures that have gradually emerged within Purdue Hackers. The vine script—the core of this badge—was created by community members at Circles, which began running at Hack Night in February of this year. And the badge’s design combined everything we’ve learned about making badges since Hack Night 1.0.

The Hack Night 5.3 badge is the culmination of the past two years of Purdue Hackers: a magnum opus reflecting the intense transformation of our culture & the unique form of creative expression it now enables. We really mean it when we say it: it’s the best badge we’ve ever made.