Wrap Up
Warning: Spoilers Ahead!
A big thank you to everyone who participated in our first hunt! In total,
- 593 teams signed up (391 expert teams and 202 casual teams),
- 424 teams solved at least one puzzle,
- 211 teams welcomed Sporky back as family, and
- 105 teams solved every puzzle.
Special congratulations to these teams:
-
Have you tried capes? for being the first team to solve every puzzle at 2 hours 32 minutes!
- lovEMAThboy finished 2nd at 3 hours 6 minutes, and
- aniMATEd finished 3rd at 4 hours 5 minutes.
- Pluru for being the first team to bring Sporky back home. They finished the final meta puzzle at the 1 hour 19 minute mark.
- Narratively Entertaining Stories and Buzzbear Lightbear both finished the final meta at the 1 hour and 32 minute mark, 3 seconds apart!
Thank you to everyone who filled out our feedback form. We received many insightful suggestions and also an overwhelming amount of positive feedback. In the following sections, we want to take some time to discuss our design goals and address some questions and comments. We also want to share some fun stuff (stats, songs, and stories)!
Goals
Our primary goal was to create a puzzle hunt that would be fun for puzzlers of all experience levels. We wanted to create a hunt that is doable by people with no puzzle hunt experience, while being fresh for experienced solvers. Many of our friends don’t do puzzle hunts, so designing something approachable for them especially was a plus.
In addition to this, we also wanted to:
- Create a hunt with a cohesive storyline and theme,
- Include a broad variety of puzzle mechanics and ideas (something for everyone), and
- Keep the hunt a reasonable length so that it can be done in a single weekend.
Based on the feedback and stats we collected, we think we’ve largely achieved these goals. There were certainly some things we could’ve done better (which we’ll address in the following sections), but we’re also happy with how our first puzzle hunt turned out!
Design
- Theme and Story -
The hunt theme was the first thing we decided. Pixar felt like a great candidate since it was something we were passionate about and had a small but diverse set of lovable films. We chose to include one puzzle for each feature film franchise, and also included 2 recent animated shorts (“Bao” and “Piper”) as beginner-friendly warm-up puzzles.
We chose Toy Story to be both the basis for our hunt story as well as the final meta, since it was the film that started it all. The story begins with you falling asleep and waking up in the fictional Toy Story universe as a toy jigsaw piece. Budd and Goody explain that Sporky (a toy spork based on Forky from Toy Story 4) has gone missing, and that they believe he may have used a toy interdimensional portal to travel to other Pixar universes. You’re asked to look for clues and figure out where he went.
After collecting answers from each film-themed puzzle, you return to Bonnie’s room and piece together a mysterious note that says to FIND ALL THE EASTER EGGS. This takes you on a journey from film to film looking for and identifying various easter eggs (references) to other Pixar films. When you return, the note has changed to say NOW RETRACE YOUR STEPS, at which point you’ll find that the easter eggs spell out BONNIE’S TRASH CAN as the location for where Sporky is hiding.
In Bonnie’s trash can, you find Sporky crying to himself that he’s trash. After solving toy variants of all the main round puzzles, you tell Sporky, “YOU’VE GOT A FAMILY.” The toy portal spawns a magical video conference where all the Pixar heroes appear. They all exclaim in unison that they’re family, allowing Sporky to realize he belongs.
- Puzzles and Format -
Before writing any puzzles, we carefully read through David Wilson’s Introduction to Writing Good Puzzle Hunt Puzzles. Some of our main takeaways included:
- Solvability: as puzzle writers, we are playing to lose. We want to give our solvers a challenge, but we ultimately want them to solve our puzzles.
- Strive for elegance. We should provide “aha!” moments (ideally more than one, but not too many), stay true to our themes, provide just enough information, and choose answers that should make sense once they’re seen.
- Avoid frustration and tedium. Solvers generally won’t have fun if they’ve been stuck on a puzzle for too long, and/or if they have to do a lot of manual work.
On elegance, we thought a number of puzzles satisfied this quite well. In particular, Recette du Succès, Heroine’s Journey, and Highway Petrol each had several “aha!” steps that led to their final answers.
On tedium, we also thought we did well on this, with the exception of Stargazing and Transmission Mission. These generally seemed to be good puzzles, but involved more mechanical work. These also happened to be the first 2 puzzles we wrote, so we do think we managed to improve our puzzle designs as we progressed. More thoughts in the next section on these.
Besides the puzzles themselves, we also spent about a week implementing the puzzle drawing tool featured in several of our puzzles. We wrote this code from scratch, and believed it would help reduce the tedium of a few puzzles. Several people requested an “undo” button - a great idea that we did think of, but ran out of time to implement. We prioritized the core functionality, transparency, save feature, and mobile support first.
Solvability was the most difficult aspect to balance. To meet our goals, we needed our puzzles to be approachable enough that any new puzzler can get started, but also not too obvious that experienced solvers would feel they were trivial.
Our solution to this was to implement an Expert/Casual track + hint unlock system. We generally started by making our puzzles more cryptic to start with, and added/adjusted hints to make connections easier for novice teams. We believed that immediate self-serve hints (as well as partial answer confirmations) would be greatly appreciated by teams that wanted them. To still respect the competitive nature of expert teams, we opted to release the self-serve hints only after a good number of teams finished the hunt.
Our ranking system was also slightly different compared to most hunts (which typically reward finishing the final meta most highly). Although we awarded an extra point for solving the final metapuzzle, we generally wanted to reward teams that solved more puzzles over those who raced faster. There were a couple reasons for this:
- We wanted the meta puzzles to be on the easier side. We hoped that even novice teams could progress through the meta and gain a sense of accomplishment, even if most puzzles were difficult. The final Toy Puzzles page was meant as a “victory lap” to give teams a chance to revisit all the puzzles and recap the hunt.
- We had a wide variety of fun puzzles that we wanted to encourage teams to try. If the primary sort was by final meta finish time, that would discourage teams from attempting harder puzzles like Transmission Mission (and penalize teams for trying it first, since it took longer than average).
Reflections
- Timeline -
We started drafting our hunt on August 15, 2020. In total, the two of us spent ~3 months of our spare time working on this hunt. ~1/3 of our time was spent on puzzle design, creation, and testing. ~2/3 was spent on website work, including learning how to use Firebase, designing and writing server, client, frontend, and canvas code, and of course, art! We wanted to get this hunt out before the end of the year (to give people something fun to do while still in isolation), so we worked pretty hard to get it out fast. We paused a lot of other hobbies for these past few months, but we are excited to finally have some breathing room again.
- Tech -
We used Github Pages to host the front end (html/css/client-side js code). Our server-side code (answer checker, signup logic, team data, leaderboard, etc.) made use of Google’s Firestore and Firebase Functions with Node.js. We dumped logs to Google Sheets during the hunt to make it easier for us to monitor how the hunt was going.
We were really happy with how well our tech performed (especially since our code was written from scratch!). We had 1500+ visitors and >1000 guesses/minute at our peak. Our answer checker was responsive throughout.
- Hunt Start Time -
A few people mentioned that the hunt start time (6PM PST / 9PM EST) was too late for East Coast/Central US participants. We’ll make sure to choose a better start time next time (probably earlier on Friday, or Saturday morning). Our initial intention was to start the hunt after getting off work on Friday.
- Website Design, Art, Usability, and Accessibility -
We’re honored by how many people told us they loved our website design and artwork for the hunt! We worked hard to make all the puzzles look seamless and polished on the website itself. All of the icons and background images were hand-drawn using Procreate, and there was a lot of toying with CSS to create the playful design of the website.
A few usability/accessibility features we’ve taken note of for next time:
- Printer-friendly versions of some puzzles.
- For this hunt, we did provide downloadable images for the puzzles, which can be printed. (For each canvas-based puzzle, there was an image link embedded in the “Tip: You can draw on the image below!” text.)
- Internally, we did have PDF drafts of each puzzle. The main reason these weren’t released was because while we were still making changes to the puzzles, it became increasingly difficult to keep the PDFs in sync with the website. Having multiple versions of each puzzle during the hunt would also make it more difficult to issue errata and ensure all solvers had consistent versions. Instead, we made all puzzle images downloadable and puzzle text copy-pasteable for people who didn’t want to work directly on the website itself.
- We also had plans to release a Google Sheets workbook for all puzzles. This wasn’t released for the same reasons as above (difficult to enforce consistency, slower for us to issue errata). We’re a two-person team with no editors, so we didn’t want to risk puzzles getting out of sync.
- For next time, we can consider cleaning these up and getting them ready for the hunt.
- Puzzle titles on the puzzles page were difficult to see and/or search for. Instead of making puzzle titles part of the icon images (what we did this time), we can add titles under the icons as searchable text.
- Puzzle solutions displayed on the main puzzles page. For this hunt, each team’s personal team page displayed all their solved puzzles. We can also add puzzle solutions for solved puzzles to the main puzzles page under each puzzle icon.
- Colorblindness. We’ll be more aware of making puzzles that are colorblind-friendly, where color matters (e.g. for the color nonogram).
- Drawing Tool -
Many teams reported loving the canvas, which was great to hear! This is a tool we coded ourselves to help support some of the more drawing-oriented puzzles. We received a few suggestions we can incorporate for next time:
- Request for an “undo” feature. Our current implementation doesn’t store any stroke history, so we couldn’t provide this. We can give this a try next time.
- The tool was clunky for some puzzles (e.g. the nonogram). In the future, we can be more selective of which puzzles have the drawing tool enabled. Alternatively, we can also provide an “on/off” switch to allow users to toggle whether they want the drawing tool on for each puzzle or not.
- More advanced features. We recommend trying out Google Jamboard, which is an interactive, collaborative whiteboard/image editor.
- Meta -
The meta was our most loved puzzle. We’re really happy to see that many teams enjoyed the Easter egg hunt and the toy puzzle victory lap. The main piece of feedback here was that many teams found the meta to be too guessable, and were able to solve it without having solved many main round puzzles.
We discussed in our Goals and Design sections above why we were okay with a relatively easy meta. In short, we did want every team (regardless of experience level) to have the meta-solving experience.
For next time, however, we can implement an unlock structure where the meta isn’t allowed to be solved until a certain number of main round puzzles (say, 75%) have been solved first. We can even apply this feature to Expert teams only. This way, Expert teams can still have a competitive experience, while Casual teams can still try any puzzle any time they want.
- Puzzle-Specific Feedback -
Generally, our puzzles were received quite well, which we were glad to see! Each puzzle’s solution page has Authors’ Notes discussing our thoughts. Some feedback we’d like to address for a few puzzles:
- Stargazing
- A number of teams found it too tedious to look up each invention, query for each star, and identify each star on the map. We probably could’ve found a way to use fewer stars, or at least labeled some stars to make this easier for solvers. We did get some feedback that this puzzle was nicely parallelizable in larger teams, but we also learned that we had many more solo solvers than expected.
- One of the goals for this puzzle was for solvers to learn some fun trivia about technology, so hopefully you learned something new! We were also happy to hear that we had some astronomy lovers and teams that enjoyed the interactivity with the answer checker.
- Transmission Mission
- Pipe manipulation was difficult for many teams. If we write any puzzles similar to this in the future, we’ll try to come up with a better format for it.
- Charming But Cryptic
- We learned from feedback that 30 Down (“mix antidotes” == “mix cures” => CURSE) is an indirect anagram, which is considered unfair. We won’t use indirect anagrams in the future.
- Love -
Finally, we are touched by the overwhelmingly positive reception to our first hunt, and elated to hear that many of you had fun! Here are some of the encouraging comments we received:
- “Thanks very very much for writing this hunt! :D It was very pretty, and especially good for beginners ^^”
- “You rock! Please make more :D”
- “The website drawing/markup tools were nice. The story was heartwarming.”
- “This hunt was great! We really enjoyed having a hunt on the easy side. It felt relaxing and rewarding. I'm amazed how many great aha's you packed in, and even the easy ones felt rewarding. This was probably my favorite hunt of the year. If the site is still up, I will recommend it to others looking to try out a puzzle hunt for the first time.”
- “I really liked the art and graphic design for the site!! It was really great, the theme was amazing, and the story was cohesive; the puzzles fit well in the story ^^ I also liked the meta; and the theme for Stargazing; i'm a big fan of constellations and space, and wall-e is super cute <333”
- “You all did a great job increasing UX for remote teams! The ability to draw and the Google Sheets crossword were so thoughtful and a huge efficiency boost and let us focus on in the fun of the puzzles. Great job, and appreciate you all being so thoughtful.”
- “Honestly, this was so well put together, it made our group's weekend. Thanks so much for all your efforts! Looking forward to future ones :)”
Credits
- Puzzle design: Darren/Caroline
- Website UI: Caroline, Darren
- Website Backend: Darren, Caroline
- Art: Caroline, with Darren’s assistance
- Test solvers: Victor, Alvin, Francis, Xinge, Pooneh
- Special thanks to Victor and Alvin for all their help!
Future Plans
We really enjoyed making this hunt, learned so much in the process, and were really happy to see that many people would do our hunts in the future! We’ll need a break after all the hard work we put into this one, but we’ll hopefully be back sometime in the near future. Now that we have the website framework in place, a longer timespan, and insightful feedback, we’ll be able to spend more time on puzzle design and hopefully bring back an even better hunt next time! :)
Thanks for joining us on this adventure, and we’ll see you at the next one!
❤️ Support Us ❤️
If you enjoyed our puzzles and would like to support us, you can:
-
Donate via Paypal (preferred),
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or consider buying some stickers! (We received a lot of appreciation for our art, thank you!)
Big hugs for the people who donated already and a huge thank you for your generosity!
Appendix. Fun Stuff
A. Stats
i. Solve Counts
Of the 424 teams that solved at least 1 puzzle, 24.8% of teams solved every puzzle. There were 15 main round puzzles (2 warm-up “shorts” and 13 main “features”) and 4 parts to the metapuzzle. On the leaderboard, we awarded an extra point for solving the final metapuzzle (Toy Puzzles).
The chart above is interactive. You can also view it in Google Sheets.
The “Shorts” (warmup puzzles) were generally the easiest, while Transmission Mission was the hardest. Familia Tunes would have had the 3rd highest solve count, but ~1/3rd of teams did not send in any tunes to receive the final answer.
The chart above is interactive. You can also view it in Google Sheets.
ii. Leaderboard Race
20 teams finished all 19 puzzles within 8 hours of the hunt start time.
The chart above is interactive. You can also view it in Google Sheets.
B. Guess Logs
A log of all the unique guesses and their counts can be found here. A few of our favorites:
- HAIRY GODMOTHER and WARY POTTER for Charming But Cryptic, submitted by JEP and Young Adult Fantasy Fiction IS Literature, respectively
- THE TRIVIAL PARRSUIT OF HAPPINESS for Math is Math, submitted by Mavericks
- MANY GUESSES LEFT BUT HOW MANY RIGHT for Transmission Mission, submitted by Time Vultures
- BE KNIFE TO HIM and YOUVE SAVED A CITY for Puzzled Toys Toy with Puzzles!, submitted by Narratively Entertaining Stories and 17th Shard, respectively
C. Familia Tunes
We had a lot of incredible submissions! A full index of all submissions can be found here. We marked 10 of our favorites in green, and more (also awesome!) honorable mentions in blue. Comment access is open - but please leave positive comments only!
Here are 10 of our favorite submissions:
| # | Song | Parody | Comments | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | "Go the Distance"
Hercules |
"PIANO GO THE DISTANCE"
cardinality rejects |
Best Piano Performance | |||||||
| 26 | "A Whole New World"
Aladdin |
"A Five Man Ult"
🚀🚀🚀 |
Best League of Legends Parody | |||||||
| 74 | "Snuff Out the Light"
The Emperor’s New Groove |
"For My Family’s Honor"
Buzzbear Lightbear |
Most Thoughtful Response | |||||||
| 86 | "Be Our Guest"
Beauty and the Beast |
"Wear A Mask"
WIT |
Wear a Mask Goodness | |||||||
| 88 | "Alexander Hamilton"
Hamilton |
"Multipurpose Kitchen Brush"
Extreme Ways |
Best Original Rap | |||||||
| 107 | "How Far I’ll Go"
Moana |
"Moana-How Far I’ll Go (Parody voice over)"
Farrow’s Marrow |
Funniest Voice-Over | |||||||
| 116 | "Part of Your World"
The Little Mermaid |
"Nail Polish World"
Balloon House Tickets Are Expensive |
Best Use of (Nail) Polish | |||||||
| 120 | "I’ll Make a Man Out of You"
Mulan |
"We’ll solve this puzzle too"
Woody Set Go |
Best Live Performance w/ Lyrics | |||||||
| 128 | "You've Got a Friend in Me"
Toy Story |
"We Tried To Backsolve These"
Mokkaroni |
Best Accordion Performance w/ Lyrics | |||||||
| 129 | "Friends on the Other Side"
The Princess and the Frog |
"Friends with the Twenty Side"
bed umber |
Best Dungeons and Dragons Parody | |||||||
| Click here to view the rest of the submissions! | ||||||||||
i. Stats (for Public Submissions)
- We indexed 166 submissions in total.
- "Let It Go" from Frozen was the most parodied song, with 23 submissions.
- "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid was the 2nd most parodied song, with 14 submissions.
- "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid and "I’ll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan tied for the 3rd most parodied song, with 12 submissions each.
- 54 total songs were parodied from 30 movies/works.
- 29 submissions parodied songs that no one else parodied.
- 119 teams submitted audio clips or videos with no picture, 42 teams submitted videos, 4 teams submitted only lyrics, and 1 team submitted a spooky skeleton drawing.
- The average submission length was 41 seconds.
- The shortest clip was 4 seconds and the longest clip was 3 minutes and 56 seconds.
D. Story Time
i. Funny
- “idk disney so i labeled tangled as frozen in Familia Tunes and then my team got mad at me”
- “We played chicken on who would do the Familia Tunes submission for an hour before someone caved in. There was a lot of swearing. Evidently, we'd much rather spam guesses instead of doing something guaranteed to give us an answer.”
- “You can sing ‘Must You Pile the Food Sky High?’ to the tune of ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight?’, and that bothers me.”
ii. Wholesome
- “We'd just showed my 4 year old daughter Inside Out and Brave for the first time in the last month so we were in the Pixar mindset (and lucky for me that the Inside Out puzzle required the most movie knowledge). It was fun to be able to share some parts of the easier puzzles with her... we looked at animal pictures together for WWW and Ocean Exploring, listened to Disney songs for Familia Tunes (and she identified a couple of the wrong words), did a bit of the word search together for Heroine's Journey, and even worked our way through a bunch of the Highway Petrol Sudoku together.”
- This is super wholesome! We love hearing about how people are sharing our puzzle hunt with their families :)
- “My 13 year old daughter enjoyed doing some of the puzzles with me.”
- “My friend sent me this puzzle hunt on Friday and I decided to sign up at the last minute (maybe 20 minutes before the start time??) despite being unable to rally anyone to join me because I was curious. The fact that there was a casual mode made me feel OK about signing up just to see the puzzles even if I didn't finish the hunt. Once the event started, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the art for all of the puzzles was unbelievably adorable! (aDOORable?) Between sending my friends screenshots and sending out a call for people who could help with Disney Tunes and trivia, I ended up with a full team and we ACTUALLY finished the meta! The hunt started at 6pm. By midnight I and the 2 other people I convinced to join me were about to call it a night but then 3 other people decided to hop on and start blazing through the puzzles. I stayed up till 3am! (oops!). Thank you for making such an engaging and highly diverse puzzle set!”
- We’re glad to hear that the casual track encouraged more people to try our hunt. Thanks for letting us know how much you enjoyed our puzzles! <3
- “We had a great time screensharing to solve the word search / maze puzzle.”
- “Our team is actually all JPL employees, and we were super happy to see our Mars missions referenced in the Wall-E puzzle and in the meta. Thanks for the shoutout :)”
- We’re honored that you tried out our hunt! We wanted to take the chance with the Wall-E puzzle to highlight a subset of key technologies that have led us to where we are today, especially on the space exploration front, given Wall-E’s theme. Thanks for all of your hard work to make Mars exploration possible!
iii. One Last Easter Egg
We hid our own Easter Egg in Heroine’s Journey’s word search:
