How do you start writing a puzzle hunt? The answer is wildly different depending on the puzzle hunt you are writing. The process to write a Puzzled Pint is very different from the process to write a MIT Mystery Hunt. However, no matter the hunt, there are a couple questions that it is important to ask yourself before embarking on the hunt.
Who Are You and What Are You Capable of?
Shortly after Palindrome won the 2021 MIT Mystery Hunt, we came to the conclusion that there was no way that we were going to top the :Projection Device. :✈️✈️✈️ Galactic Trendsetters ✈️✈️✈️ was basically like a small video game company, something that we were not. Instead, we spent time figuring out what we wanted from a hunt and what we were good at.
Be honest with yourself as a writer. What do you have the capability of doing? What kind of puzzles can you write? What tech skills do you have? Where are your strengths and your weaknesses? What kind of voice do you have? These are honestly not bad things to take stock of even if you’re not currently writing a hunt. You don’t need a hunt to write puzzles – you just need a good idea and some time to put something together.
What Do You Want People To Take Away From Your Hunt?
What is the core message of your hunt? What do you want people to say about your hunt years after it happened? Obviously, you can’t completely control this, but you can control a lot of the general themes.
I think the biggest example of this is First Day on the Job. (Spoilers for that, obviously.) I wanted that hunt to feel like you were investigating something – like that there was something deeper that you were uncovering. That really unlocked the whole synergy mechanic – the first round puzzles were filled with so much extra information that to experienced puzzlers, they would feel wrong. The puzzles were filled with hidden messages or other streams of information that don’t seem to be relevant to how it was actually solved, which is not how puzzles normally are. Hopefully, this meant that the beginning of the Synergy step that folks would start to realize what was going on, and the meta was meant to be the “we put everything on the corkboard” part of the investigation, even if I didn’t really have the :art skills for that.
The takeaway from your hunt can be many different things. It can be a theme that you want to suffuse everything that you do. It can be an aspect of hunts that you feel that you have done particularly well. It can be a particular type of puzzle or a novel structure that affects the mechanics. It can be a general air of approachability and friendliness. Whatever it is – it’s important to define it at the start, because if you don’t define one, the solvers will define it for you, and it might not be something you like.
Who is Your Hunt For?
Back when I was teaching, I used to write puzzle hunts for students and teachers. As most of the students and teachers were not puzzle hunters, I could not depend on the knowledge of common puzzle hunt traditions, such as :eigenletters or indexing. Whenever one of those would come up in a puzzle, I would put a sidebar explaining them, which took up space on whatever I was using to present the puzzle.
Obviously, this is an extreme example, but even amongst hunts designed for more frequent puzzlers there are large variations. If you have previous events to set precedent – great! The MIT Mystery Hunt has shown multiple times that it just expects someone on your team to know electrical engineering and circuit diagrams, which is not something I would expect of a hunt with significantly smaller team sizes.
What is the Medium of Your Hunt?
The medium of your hunt can affect the puzzles you write a lot. A hunt where the solvers are given the puzzles on paper can have intricate, precisely-printed folding puzzles, whereas a hunt that is distributed across the internet needs to account for teams who might not even have a printer. On the flip side, a hunt distributed across the internet can have completely automated interactive puzzles, whereas a hunt that is distributed on paper will generally require their interactive puzzles to be human-powered, creating inherent limits.
Paper puzzles can create all sorts of additional concerns and limitations. You can have any number of people gather around a spreadsheet on their own screen, but you can only get so many people around a single piece of paper. In addition, many solving tools become significantly less useful. Websites like Nutrimatic and OneLook :still work but take longer to use, increasing the barrier of entry. Also, knowledgeable folks can work wonders with spreadsheet formulas, eliminating some human error and making trying some ideas much quicker. Heck, even just trying different orderings can be incredibly time-consuming on paper as you can’t :sort by every column.
Electronic puzzles may get around all of that, but they still have plenty of things to consider. The biggest consideration is the framework you are using to get the puzzles out there. Are you throwing everything in a pdf or is each puzzle their own website? Are you using a static site to display your puzzles or are you using a server-side framework to distribute your puzzles to your solvers? How are your solvers submitting their answers, and do you have the ability to check intermediate phrases or give additional instructions after a submission?
Wrapping it Up
Where do you go from there? Well, it depends. You’ve now put a number of constraints on your hunt – where do those constraints lead you? Writing a hunt is a lot like writing a logic puzzle. You put down the first couple constraints, and let those lead you as far as you can go. Determine everything that follows from the answers to the above questions before you make another decision. This way, you can make sure that your decisions align with your previous answers.
But usually, you’ll go from these to theme and structure. But that’s a different blog post.
– Cute Mage
:X ArtSkills
I am very proud of what I was able to accomplish for that meta display-wise. I am also really proud of the chat interface that I blatantly stole from an example layout and adjusted for my needs.
:X Eigenletters
These are letters that show up in the same place between two words, such as the G in maGic and riGht.
:X Galactic
Pronounced woosh Galactic Trendsetters neow
:X ProjectionDevice
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Projection Device, in 2021 :✈️✈️✈️ Galactic Trendsetters ✈️✈️✈️ essentially created an MMO of MIT’s campus. In order to unlock a puzzle, you first had to find it, which often meant completing challenges inside the MMO to get to the person for the first time. It was absolutely amazing.
:X SortByEveryColumn
Until Morale Improves
:X StillWork
Compare this to qat, which is significantly harder to use on the phone, not just because I tend to use more nonalphanumeric symbols in qat queries, but also because I have not figured out how to type the ` character on my phone, removing a great feature of qat.