[Meta] Puzzled Toys Toy with Puzzles!

There are a series of 15 mini puzzles on this page, each of which resembles one of the 15 main round puzzles. You should apply similiar mechanics as the main puzzles to solve these toy puzzles. Each toy puzzle should yield a single letter.

To convince Sporky that he's loved, we tell him: YOU'VE GOT A FAMILY! To finish the story, head over to the epilogue:

That's correct! To finish the hunt, head over to https://darocaro.github.io/puzzles/familyeverafter

Wow, there's a lot to say about the meta puzzles! We spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to write this. Since Toy Story was the film that started it all, we thought it would be appropriate have a Toy Story final puzzle, but we also wanted to include all the other films in a way to show that they're all unique and part of this larger "Pixar family." It was also especially important to us to tie the overarching (toy) story together using the answers in the meta. As such, we chose a list of answers we liked first, before trying to design the mechanics.

We played with several ideas before settling on the final three-stage meta. The idea that went the furthest was having solvers travel through different rooms of Bonnie's home in search for Sporky. Each room (living on a different webpage) would have toy- and game-themed puzzles related to that room. (For example, the kitchen might involve fridge magnets, the bathroom would use bath toys, the backyard would have a sandbox, and so forth.) In order to make it a true meta, however, we needed ways to tie our main round puzzles back into this puzzle, and it wasn't easy for us to figure out how to map the main round puzzles to different rooms or toys.

After a while, we stepped back and looked more closely at the most fundamental elements that make a meta work. In our experience, metas typically either directly involve the answers from previous puzzles (taking letters or using them in punny ways), or involve simplified versions of previous puzzles (revisiting their mechanics and themes) as a sort of "victory lap." We found that the latter idea actually fitted really well with Toy Story's theme, since we could essentially make toy versions of each puzzle!

However, we didn't want our main round puzzles to be too easy to backsolve by doing the meta. Furthermore, we wanted to follow through with a physical, page-to-page search (partially inspired by REDDOThunt's Site Visits puzzle). What we ultimately came up with was to combine these 2 elements by hiding the "toy puzzles" behind other meta pages involving a search.

In this way, we could directly involve each solution's answers, do a fun search, and then finally give solvers the "victory lap" of solving the (easy) toy puzzles, all while advancing our story.

For the search itself, we had an "Aha!" moment when we realized how much Pixar loved to put Easter eggs in their films. It actually became a tradition for Pixar to hide references to future Pixar movies in each of their feature films (source). We found this to be perfect not only because finding these hidden Easter eggs is fun, but also because it strengthens the theme of our storyline -- that all the Pixar films are part of one larger family. (This might also allow us to argue that such a cross-Pixar dimension "toy portal" may be plausible!)

With this idea solidified, we wrote a couple of riddles in "mysterious note" forms involving puzzle answers, had solvers do an Easter egg hunt, then finally brought our puzzlers back to revisit toy versions of all of our puzzles.

If you've made it this far, thanks so much for trying our puzzles! We had fun designing this hunt, and we hope you enjoyed the adventure!