Wrap-Up

First, congrats to Speedrun or bust, We Regret To Inform You That It Is Projectyl, and Dragon Phoenix Dog 1 for being the first three teams to finish (the first in under an hour, the second and third both being solo teams, and the third for 100%ing the hunt with no incorrect guesses!) Also congrats to mattapuzzle, our fourth place team, for being the first team to 100% the hunt. Congrats to Ski Nautique, Lil Stoop, and Kwargers for winning the high school division (Ski Nautique also being first to reach 100% in the division), and solosis, those without sanity, and Peehs for winning the middle school division!

Other records: Speedrun or bust also got the first solve of the hunt, solving Bottom Lines in 31 seconds from the start of the hunt, and mattapuzzle got the first solve of the first meta. And returning to the final meta, Me-Stik Spiral was the team that solved it the soonest after unlocking it. A quick shoutout to first solves on all the other puzzles: Congrats to

• ⚡🧲Biri-Biri🛤️🔫 for the first solve on Top-Down Processing,
• Mad Jaqk’s Dad Paqk for the first solve on Petal Path,
• (mongolian vowel separator) for the first solves on Greek Figures and Danger!,
• West for the first solve on Geocaching,
• Cardinality for the first solve on The Magic Match; and
• ➡⬇↘🅿 for first solve on Deity Duos.

Finally, thank you to everybody who donated to the low-tech charity drive: we received receipts for over $1,200 of donations!

Statistics/Charts

• [1] 452 teams registered for the hunt
• [2] 434 teams opened the puzzle page (96.0% of [1])
• [3] 414 teams solved at least one puzzle (91.6% of [1])
• [4] 390 teams solved the round one meta (94.2% of [3])
• [5] 283 teams finished the hunt (solved the round two meta) (68.4% of [3])
• [6] 166 teams finished the hunt in 24 hours (40.1% of [3])
• [7] 143 teams solved all the puzzles (34.5% of [3])

Here's a chart of the top 30 teams' progress! (Times are in UTC.)

We also have charts of the progress of every finishing team, the bigboard we used to monitor hunt progress, and a separate stats page for the overall hunt. And on the puzzles and teams pages, every puzzle and team also links to statistics about that specific puzzle and team.

You can also download the full guesslog for the puzzlehunt; if you find other interesting statistics or visualizations, we'd be interested to know!

Story and Theme

Solvers were introduced to Dippy the dragon-phoenix, who was celebrating their rebirthday on Dilemma Planet, but was unable to find their friends to celebrate with. Dippy asked solvers to solve puzzles on Dilemma Planet to find them. It turns out that those friends were different birds who had hidden themselves among the first round answers, and solving the first round meta helped Dippy message all of Dippy’s friends by TWEETING.

In the second round of puzzles, solvers had to solve puzzles to fuel Dippy’s rebirth pyre. Each second round puzzle was related to fire in some way, and putting all of the answers together revealed Dippy’s new form, a PYROTECHNICAL FOWL. After solvers solve the main round meta, Dippy completes their rebirth, rises from their pyre, and gives the solvers one of their featherscales as a parting gift.

The idea and name for the DP Puzzle Hunt basically came from the existence of the BN puzzle hunt and Co-Puzzle Hunt earlier this year and the observation made by several people that Caesar shifting “BN” by one produced “CO”, so “DP” would be the logical next hunt.

On August 15, betaveros came up with “Dippy the Dragon-Phoenix” as a half-joke in 15 minutes. As the hunt developed, Level 51 and Joman came up with various ideas for worldbuilding and the story, and somehow our hunt developed to the point where it had a plot and kind of coherent metas, all in the space of two months.

Design Goals and Philosophy

Our general goal with DP Puzzle Hunt was to write an easy puzzlehunt. Broadly, we were inspired by the many people who have been running and announcing puzzlehunts on Puzzle Hunt Calendar lately (perhaps in part due to COVID-19 lockdowns making other forms of entertainment harder to participate in?), and wanted to join the fun.

At the same time, we realized that a lot of our favorite puzzlehunts that we’ve written and participated in are fairly difficult, perhaps because they’re targeted at people similar to the writers and because often, the most interesting puzzles require a certain floor of difficulty to retain their interestingness. However, this also means that completely beginner-friendly puzzlehunts are a lot rarer, so we set out to write one, while still holding our puzzles and puzzle mechanics to the same standards.

In our initial planning doc, we wrote that “the median puzzle should be a 6x6 crossword with some squares circled”, and in the rules, we compared our hunt to Colby’s Curious Cookoff (which is a recent polished, beginner-friendly hunt we highly recommend). In hindsight, we realized we likely overshot the advertised difficulty with some of our Round 2 puzzles. We expected The Magic Match to be difficult due to its length, but were somewhat okay with it because it was at least still approachable to solvers who hadn’t done puzzles before. Probably bigger offenders were Deity Duos, which was nerfed dramatically from an even harder version (!) but had burned through most of our testsolvers at that point, so we didn’t have a solid grasp of its difficulty; and Geocaching, which was written quite late, so we weren’t able to spend as much time as we might have liked to calibrate the difficulty. On the bright side, based on the feedback form we got, the vast majority of responses rated the overall difficulty level of the puzzles either a 2 or 3 (on a 5-point scale), so we think we probably didn’t overshoot the optimal difficulty.

A specific consequence was that we wanted to include an easy metapuzzle. Metapuzzles are one of our favorite parts of puzzlehunts, but we saw that they were missing in some of the recent puzzlehunts on Puzzle Hunt Calendar. Also, metapuzzles are a popular target of aggressive innovation and boundary-pushing in puzzlehunts (the 2019 Galactic Puzzle Hunt is a striking example), which makes sense because they’re many people’s favorite part of puzzlehunts, but also can make them even more inaccessible to new puzzlers than the regular puzzles. By contrast, the substring metapuzzles we included in our puzzlehunt are far from groundbreaking; we know of many other substring metapuzzles and wouldn’t be surprised if either exact category of substrings had appeared in other puzzlehunts. Instead, we simply hoped to demonstrate that metapuzzles could be simple to write while still being thematic and fun to solve. (Empirically, it looks like we succeeded in that our final metapuzzle received the highest fun rating among all puzzles in our hunt.)

A side note on metapuzzles for anybody out there who might be writing their own puzzlehunts: Obviously, most metapuzzles place constraints on the answers and necessitate them being written before any puzzles can really be started. This could limit people who want to write puzzles with extremely constrained or thematic answers, or who already have puzzles written before the meta was written. For the specific metas we chose for our puzzlehunt, we would probably not be able to accommodate such puzzles. However, we believe that it’s still possible to write interesting metapuzzles that are flexible enough to accommodate many answers. For example, the MUMS 2016 meta was an extremely flexible and (in our opinion) entertaining metapuzzle that was able to accommodate 22 of 23 random puzzle answers. As the meta answer page says:

One of the first decisions made in this Hunt was to use completely freeform answers. This was partly because we had plenty of first-time contributors to the MUMS Puzzle Hunt, but also because many of them had written their own puzzles before in preparation for their own puzzle hunt. Instead of modifying lots of puzzles to use restricted answers, we decided we would accept all puzzles (and their answers) this year, and can think about a more restrictive meta next year. This turned out not to be completely true: after 23 puzzles were finalised we finally decided on the current meta string. It turned out that we could fit 22 of them, and one of them (Pedigrees, fortunately the most flexible one) had to be changed to begin with a W. The remaining 2 puzzles came after, with one-letter restrictions.

Hints

Although, as solvers, we liked free-form hint requests a lot, multiple members on our writing team had participated in running hunts using free-form hint requests before and had learned that it was extremely time-consuming. For our hunt and our team size, we were fairly concerned that we wouldn’t have enough manpower or timezone coverage to properly respond to many hint requests from teams. So we settled on pre-written hints as the primary mechanism of delivering hints.

One big drawback of pre-written hints is that there’s always the risk that the team is stuck somewhere that the pre-written hint doesn’t help with. (We know this concern was already discussed in e.g. 2017 GPH.) So we tried pretty hard to make both of our hints useful to solvers no matter which stage of a puzzle they were stuck on. Even so, there were definitely places we didn’t expect solvers to get stuck and didn’t succeed in cluing in our hints. For example, we failed to anticipate the number of solvers who got to the last step of Nought But a Crossover, but didn’t call it in because they didn’t recognize the letters they read from the O as an actual German term instead of just random letters.

We’ve seen other hint systems that tried different ways to resolve this issue, which we might consider incorporating elements of in future hunts. For example, REDDOThunt has an Early Hint and a Late Hint for every puzzle; the two hints can be “purchased” separately, and they provide you a hint with an early or late step of the puzzle. This is also an improvement, but sometimes it’s hard for solvers to know when they’ve passed the stage when the Early Hint will be helpful or entered the stage when the Late Hint will be helpful.

Separately, we’re not big fans of voluntarily purchasing hints with actual points, which can lead to highly regretful and unfun situations. For example, you might purchase a hint and then realize that you were really close to solving the puzzle, so you just have to live with the fact that you irreversibly decreased your maximum score by making that choice. Even worse, you might purchase a hint that turned out to be useless based on where you were stuck. Now you effectively have to solve an equally difficult puzzle for fewer points.

It might be counterintuitive because this gives teams less choice, but we prefer mechanisms where hints are automatically released and, optionally, puzzle scores automatically decrease at scheduled times; this guarantees that the optimal strategy is always just “try to solve puzzles using the information you have available”, and you don’t have to worry about the meta-strategy of whether a hint is worth spending in a particular case. (Similarly, we don’t like to assign many different point values to puzzles, even if they’re different difficulties, partly to keep the strategy simple and partly because puzzle difficulty is very subjective anyway.) Another way to avoid the situation is to use a separate, unscored currency for hints. We used both mechanisms in our puzzlehunt.

As the hunt progressed, we eventually did release hint requests, and at least for this hunt, our concerns about the hint volume being too large to manage proved to be unfounded. After we hesitantly released one hint request per team, we did not get hit with a deluge of hint requests; we only got 27 hints over the whole hunt (2 of which were obsolete, and 1 of which was a test hint by our friend), and we were generous about refunding them when we were giving really small hints.

We’re not completely sure what caused the stark difference between our prior experiences and our experience with hint requests during this hunt. Perhaps the pre-written hints were a very good first line of defense. Perhaps our hunt was just at a difficulty that people were bottlenecked at finding enough time to work on it rather than getting stuck. In any case, we may be more generous with hint requests if we run another hunt of a similar structure and difficulty in the future.

Tech

(this section is by betaveros)

A secondary goal I had with running this hunt was to use it as an end-to-end test of running a hunt with the GPH website code, to see if I can recommend other people who want to run puzzlehunts to use it, and if not, what’s missing. I also tried to host the hunt on a pretty tight budget. Throughout this process, I found Alex Irpan’s blog post a valuable reference; in particular, it convinced me to at least casually load-test our website.

• I ran the hunt on Heroku, which has a pretty good free tier, but also can quickly scale way way up (or down) with the click of a few buttons (no need to restart a machine). Not only that, it’s prorated to the second. I scaled up to six “standard-1x” machines for the first few hours of hunt, which was probably overkill, but it meant our website survived a lot of people refreshing in the first few minutes of hunt, and it was still pretty cheap because I only needed to pay the six 1x machine rate for those few hours.
• One thing to watch out for is the database, which can’t be scaled up automatically; you have to create a new database, take the app down temporarily, and manually transfer the data and application. I only decided to switch to a bigger database plan the night before hunt started, I estimated the number of guesses we’d get and realized we’d outgrow the free database. Fortunately, the switch only took a minute and the database plan is also prorated.
• One big source of unexpected technological trouble was email. For the hunt I set up emails on Mailgun, put its SMTP credentials into the website code, and got transactional emails working without any hiccups. However, for the first hunt announcement, we tried to just BCC everybody from our Gmail account. This worked once, but when we tried to make a second hunt-wide announcement, Gmail blocked all of our emails. I then tried using the mailing list feature of Mailgun, which worked but then put our account on a rate limit and prevented the normal website emails from being sent. After consulting with GPH, I learned that we might have been better off using a separate mailing service for hunt-wide announcements, but that might also have been quite expensive. I’d definitely suggest that anybody who’s interested in running a puzzlehunt think carefully about how they want to implement email and have backup plans around email failures.
• One thing we received quite a few comments about was the dynamic, public fun/difficulty ratings next to every puzzle. Although we knew about the surveys and thought they would be a useful way to receive feedback on each puzzle while they were fresh in people’s minds, the ratings being public during the hunt was actually completely unintentional, and we did not realize this in testing at all because our testing accounts had permissions set up in a somewhat unusual way to not show up on the website. To make sure we didn’t accidentally break anything in a way that would affect first place, I waited until after the first team had finished the hunt to fix the decimal number truncation, but ultimately decided to leave the ratings in because it seemed like it would disadvantage future teams more to have more information about puzzles. We don’t particularly intend to keep this feature in the future, but it was an interesting experiment.

Timeline

• August 17: beta creates the Discord server and people start joining. A lot of metapuzzle ideas are tossed around, proposed, and discarded, but within the same day (depending on timezones), an ugly draft of the meta is hammered out and tested:
  
• August 19: Puzzlord is set up. First drafts of two puzzles, Play On Words and Sleep Talk, are uploaded on the same day.
• August 24: The intro meta appears and is testsolved.
• August 27: We are prepared to start publicizing our hunt when we realize that Hunt20 has been scheduled on Puzzle Hunt Calendar on the weekend we were originally planning, so we push the hunt up one week. At that point, of our 17 main round puzzles, 3 had been allocated, 9 puzzles were in testing or revising, and 5 puzzles had finished testsolving in various stages; all intro round puzzles were at least in testing.
• September 13: The last puzzle enters testsolving.
• September 18: Hunt starts!

Here's a Puzzlord-generated image of our progress:

Funny answers

(These are just the ones we thought fit to print...)

• [20:32:02] Team Me-Stik Spiral submitted BOWSEER for Smash Biros: Incorrect!!
• [21:14:53] Team ManateeM submitted GNEISSKNIFE for Geocaching: Incorrect!!
• [21:17:47] Team Speedrun or bust submitted SODOM for Deity Duos: Incorrect!!
• [21:25:00] Team Kuerbis submitted GULLIBLE for Bottom Lines: Incorrect!!
• 
• [22:04:59] Team Duplicitous Pseudonym submitted PYROTECHNICSELFOWN for META: Finding Myself: Incorrect!!
• [22:34:17] Team 🅱️uzzle Idiots submitted TWEETOMG for META: Finding Friends: Incorrect!!
• [22:41:47] Team Ski Nautique submitted PIRATECHOICEOFOWL for META: Finding Myself: Incorrect!!
• [23:09:09] Team Dog & Pony submitted WIKIUP for Sleep Talk: Incorrect!!
• [23:10:11] Team 22s submitted GIANTTOAD for Demons and Deductions: Incorrect!!
• [23:22:24] Team Is Mayonnaise an Instrument? submitted PLATONICPLATE for Geocaching: Incorrect!!
• [01:17:29] Team no gnus is good gnus submitted ITSLITERALLYTICTACTOE for Nought But a Crossover: Incorrect!!
• [04:39:57] Team njb submitted HUMBLEBUNDLE for Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other: Incorrect!!
• [11:04:47] Team no gnus is good gnus submitted ADRAGONPRINCESS for META: Finding Myself: Incorrect!!
• 

Fun stories people sent us

Hindsight is 5780:

We watched “supa hot fire vs. b bone” as a joke, because I asked if anyone had famously declared themselves not a rapper. As soon as it finished, the meta clicked for all of us and we started yelling

We received various comments about “Hades”, with some teams complaining that it was too obscure of a game, but some other teams relaying stories about how they were playing it right before the hunt or started playing it after. A highlight were StriketeamA’s comments; after politely suggesting the game might be too niche, they followed up with:

Ignore the comment on Deity Duo from my last survey. I apparently had it in my steam wishlist and totally forgot about it. Good memory, huh?

A long story from Denver Nuggets:

Unbelievably, our Puzzle Hunt team—the Denver Nuggets—seemed to dictate how the actual Denver Nuggets performed on the basketball court. Our puzzle solving ability on the night of Friday, September 21 correlated perfectly with the Denver Nuggets’ point scoring against the Los Angeles Lakers in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals. (Note: The Nuggets are substantially weaker than the Lakers.) We started off strong, solving many puzzles quickly. This was paralleled in the Nuggets’ first quarter, leading 38-36 at its end. Leading the Lakers is no easy task. Then, we couldn’t go forward because of the locked puzzles and point requirements. During this time, the Lakers made a 17-1 run to take a huge lead. That entire night of puzzle solving was filled with frustration and anger. Meanwhile, in the NBA game, the Nuggets were down 27 against the Lakers. The Nuggets lost the game, and the game was far more lopsided than the final score of 114-126. Similarly, we were wrecked in this puzzle hunt, and barely proceeded after Saturday night. The hunt carried its bad karma in the recent Game 2, when the Nuggets led 103-102 after trailing 92-100 and by as much as 16 during the game. Then the Lakers’ Anthony Davis made a game-winning/saving buzzer-beating 3-pointer, and currently, the Nuggets trail the Lakers, 0 games to 2. Hopefully typing this story for you to see will save the Nuggets, who made two 3-1 comebacks in the two rounds before the Western Conference Finals, becoming the only NBA team to do so. GO NUGGETS! ELEVATE!

Credits

• Project lead: betaveros
• Tech: betaveros (and others in ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ for the underlying code)
• Art: lydian
• Story: Level 51, Joman
• Puzzle authors and testsolvers: betaveros, boboquack, Cenarius, dalryaug, Deusovi, EpicToast™, greenturtle3141, mbingo, Idontknow, Joman, kt3, Level 51, lydian, Skynet000, Tiralmo, wolf

AMA

About us

Q: Names please, I’m really curious. Maybe lydian and greenturtle were a part of this. But maybe I’ll never know.
Q: are you ever going to reveal your identities? the public demands answers.
Q: We are interested to know about the team behind the puzzles, and their puzzlehunting and writing experience/stories to share.

• Lyd: I was one of the users involved! I have no idea why my fellow dp puzzlers thought it was a good idea to be anonymous but as you (and others) could tell, I clearly didn’t enforce it too much on myself. As for my puzzling experience, I was introduced to the wonderful world of puzzles by SPH 1 and 2! After that I had the pleasure of participating in my first mystery hunt with Test Solution; Bees Ignore, and the rest is history! This is my first time actually writing for an actual hunt though and it was awesome seeing all the positive reception!
• Level 51: Hi, I’m Level 51. I’ve been solving puzzles for about two and a half years now, and I write for some other hunts in my spare time too.
• Idontknow: For funny stories read the author notes :OOOOOOOO probably idk
• Skynet000: beep boop puzzles go brrrr
• wolf: wolf
• EpicToast: no
• kt3: kt3 here; I’m probably the most inexperienced guy out of the bunch, since I was introduced by SPH3.
• Joman: “This Hunt is run by a group of puzzlers with varying amounts of experience solving and writing puzzlehunts, but which normally do so on different teams.”
• boboquack: boboquack
• Deusovi: hello i am here! you may know me from places.
• beta: Hello. My first puzzlehunt was CiSRA 2011 and I have been puzzling ever since. I’ve been on a couple different teams, but for the last few years, I’ve been with ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈. Contrary to popular belief, Dippy is not my fursona.

Q: Who testsolved these?

• We testsolved these ourselves. We managed the testsolving process with Puzzlord, software that we borrowed from ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈. Usually one or two people wrote a given puzzle and sent it to testsolving, where some of the rest of us tried to solve it. If the solvers found any part of the puzzle too hard or inelegant, the authors would tweak the puzzle before sending it back to testsolving, whereupon more of us got to testsolve it. We repeated this until we were sure the puzzle was good to go (or, occasionally, until we ran out of time or testsolvers).

Writing the hunt

Q: Please describe some ways puzzles changed in testsolving!

• Lyd: I’ll talk mainly about Nought But a Crossover and Petal Path, as these were the two I wrote that went through significant changes.

  • NBaC originally had some batches of nine images each to ID, and involved using the “x”s and “o”s from the words you identified to extract another letter from the image in a winning move, but that idea turned out quite busywork-heavy and the extraction was unintuitive. Thankfully, greenturtle saw my original idea, helped me to brainstorm other ways to incorporate tic-tac-toe into a puzzle, and the result was NBaC as you saw it in the hunt! After we came up with the new idea, not much changed for NBaC aside from tweaking the wordsearch to remove some other unintended words.
  • As for Petal Path, I originally had an idea to use a “(s)he loves me, (s)he loves me not” mechanism where you’d place words in the petals of a flower, but the execution on that one ended up being a bit awkward. After that, I tried an image ID puzzle with famous fictional characters named after flowers alongside images of the flowers themselves (such as Princess Daisy, Remus Lupin, and Phlox from Star Trek) but that idea also felt relatively bland. kt3 then offered to help me to come up with some better ideas; when they suggested a crossword variant, I immediately thought of a petal crossword, which is the variant that was used in the final version. I came up with a fill, sent it for testsolving, and… turns out my fill wasn’t very good! It had words like DAUB, MUDS, LOTI, and LATU, which are very much not ideal—especially for a puzzle supposed to be easy—so kt3 and betaveros completely reworked the fill, and it turned out much better. After that, we adjusted some clues, and Petal Path as seen in the hunt was ready!
• Meta 1: Honorable mentions for some meta feeders that we ended up discarding for meta one were “MILWAUKEE”, “BOWLING”, “MALARKEY”, “SPEAKEASY”, “OVERHEAT”, “INTERNAL”, and many, many more. (Notice some of these were chosen before we decided on making all the answers the same length, and also notice some birds in these are quite hard to spot!)

• Meta 2:

  • Lyd: I suggested “VOLVAGIA” as a feeder (cluing FIRE TEMPLE), but that would have clashed with FATES (FIRE EMBLEM), which was probably the better option out of the two. I also thought of “SEPTEMBER” (EARTH WIND AND FIRE) but by then it was too late to include it, which was very unfortunate as, in many time zones, the hunt actually ended on the night of the 21st of September!
  • Idontknow: Some feeder answers were discarded for being the same length as others; we also discarded stuff like FIRE EXIT for conflicting with FIREWALL since some testsolvers had trouble immediately noticing the space next to the phoenix tail. The answer GRACE UNDER FIRE also just ended up being replaced by FIRE AND BRIMSTONE quite late. Also I’m really sad we were unable to work in FIREBOY AND WATERGIRL.

• Deusovi: A Fork in the Road’s final cluephrase used to not have any extra words — it was just [α]: [β] [γ] [δ]: “[ε]” [ζ]?. A few testsolvers got it, but it was a huge roadblock that we didn’t want. After experimenting a bit with finding a fourth pair of words to add, we ended up just adding a few words for grammar, and that seems to have significantly improved things.

• Skynet000: The original version of Deity Duos had a much less direct flavortext and two givens. It also had over 900 different possible solutions, due to a bug in the generation code I wrote. This was less than ideal. After fixing it (and making the flavortext super explicit), I found an arrangement of 4 givens that worked, except that it was absolutely brutal to resolve logically. Adding a 5th given smoothed it out sufficiently for our testsolves. As a side note, Hades left early access one day before the hunt launched, and I was incredibly lucky to not have the puzzle broken by patch notes.

• wolf: The original Six of One was themed after a diner setting since PACKET and FILTER both are paper things found in a diner (like a sugar packet and a coffee filter) and had some silly setting of the patrons eating a dozen eggs or something like that… but it turns out that actually made things too confusing, because trying to clue “sugar packet” and “coffee filter” that’s unambiguous turned out to be quite hard and made the puzzle pretty bloated (like twice the size of its final iteration). Tossing out the diner theme allowed the really clean presentation and title (I’m a big fan of idioms and well-known phrases as titles that’s also thematic), but it’s sad I was unable to use the neat “paper in diner” connection.

• beta: this was the first draft of Downright Cryptic, which I basically wrote to invoke Cunningham’s Law and make Level 51 write a better grid. It worked, with only one of the seven clues surviving :)

  

  Across

  1. We heard minerals are what you can use to propel a boat (4)
  2. Run away before time of a group of ships (5)
  3. Partially inflating an old language (5)
  4. Inside here, a system is not difficult (4)

  Down

  2. Terrible first ultimate flaw about you (5) (editor's note: this clue doesn't even work, I don't know what I was thinking)
  3. Inspect region concealing a British ghost (7)
  4. Shelter made from fabric of ten shirts, for short (5)

  • Level 51: actually I just realized that beta’s original grid shape might have emphasized the downright extraction better, since the slant along the main diagonal is more obvious, woops.

• kt3: Smash Biros’s first draft had the answer INTERNET BROWSER (which is inconsistent with the rest of the puzzle; don’t do this). It wasn’t until beta and Level helped me improve the puzzle and write clues. This honestly took a long time to construct, long enough that we considered scrapping it altogether lol. I’m glad it made the cut, though, and this will probably forever be my favorite puzzle ever.

Q: Which puzzles were the hardest to write/playtest?

• I don’t know if any puzzle jumps out as particularly hard to write, but we definitely had a lot of trouble getting people to testsolve The Magic Match.

Q: How long did it take to write the clues for Downright Cryptic/A Fork in the Road?

• Level 51: Downright Cryptic’s clues took longer than one might expect—the set actually includes exactly one of each of the basic clue types, so trying to cleanly work a set around the fill took a while. I wrote the clues in about an hour one night, and then beta and Deusovi went over it and made some suggestions and edits.
• Deusovi: Fork in the Road’s clues weren’t really difficult to write. The issue was more of finding the phrases. I thought of some common prefixes that had different meanings (e.g. CON), and chose phrases that would use those, then Qat helped me fill in the gaps. I’d say it took about 20-30 minutes total to come up with a set I was completely satisfied with.

Q: What on Earth prompted you to include a duck konundrum?

• Joman: We wanted a variety of puzzle types and someone (me) enjoys doing conundra. I also think that it is technically an easy type of puzzle, it is just a bit tedious for some people.

Q: How long did it take you to make this?

• betaveros proposed the hunt August 15th, and we’ve been working on it ever since, so a little under two months in general.

Future hunt plans

Q: Will you do an EQ puzzlehunt?
Q: Are there going to be more hunts like this? This was awesome!
Q: This hunt was great! And I can’t believe how quickly you put it together. Do you have plans to do another one in the future?

• I think we received enough donations to make this likely, though not certain, and not for probably a full year or so. If we do end up doing it, I’m sure the puzzles will be of Exceptional Quality!

Q: If you make any future hunts, will Dippy be returning (or will you have a new cast)?

• We haven’t thought that far ahead yet, I’m afraid.

Stats

Q: Do you guys have answer times saved?

• All answer times are published on the statistics pages of teams and puzzles.

Q: How many people submitted DUAL MASTER for 21st Century Celluloid Man?

• There were 10 submissions of DUALMASTER; its cousin DUALSTREAM actually had 11. You can check out the stats of each of the puzzles around their respective puzzle pages.

Q: showing fun & difficulty ratings publicly was… unconventional. not sure i have an opinion one way or the other re: good/bad. i suppose difficulty ratings could be used as a way to determine which puzzles to solve or skip, but that information is also conveyed by # of solves/guesses. mostly, just. Why?

• This was purely unintentional, we copied and changed some code from GPH and then didn’t test it :laughing_crying:

Other

Q: Did seriously nobody register the domain puzzlehunt.net before this hunt?

• beta: Yeah I was surprised too. But maybe I shouldn’t be, given that puzzlehunts are still a really niche hobby.

Q: How about open-sourcing the website? :)

• The core of the website is already open-source, thanks to ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈—it’s mentioned in the footer of every page! We’ll be working on upstreaming some improvements/changes we made.

Q: Why does Kipper sometimes speak with emojis? (Geocaching)

• 😂❗ 🐉🐦🧙‍♂️✨💬➡️{😮…}

Q: Did the tour guide from Geocaching ever put 2 and 2 together.

• The woman stands behind the desk, her nose turning slightly in the air, searching for the source of the slightly oaken smell of smoke. It’s been hours since the mysteriously… scaly? feathery? visitors came and left, and yet a faint cloud of smoke still lingers in the air, even as the late afternoon sun streams in through the open doorway, refracting through the haze of…wait, open doorway? Suddenly it comes to her. Suddenly she realizes. Suddenly she has an insight, a flash of brilliance, as two and two come together in her mind, harmoniously coalescing into a single thought, blindingly obvious in her simplicity—she forgot to put up the “No Smoking” sign this morning.
• Tour guide: Yeah, 4.

Q: Why was “spark” bolded in the section intros…?

• The unlock system’s currency (✨) was called sparks but we didn’t make that connection obvious enough, whoops.

Q: Do you have any ideas for how to reach out to more young puzzlers?

• Puzzles, in general, tend to have a rather high entry barrier. There's a lot of friction involved in getting into puzzles for the first time; puzzles are by nature the kind of hobby you'd spend a significant chunk of time on, and people are busy. Online hunts, though arguably the most fun due to the real-time experience they offer (via elements such as puzzle unlocks), are tied to a particular slot in the calendar, which makes it even harder for people to carve time out of their schedule to participate in them. What's more, puzzles, with their requirement of brain usage, just generally don't seem very appealing to those less familiar with the concept.

  Therefore, to reach out to more young puzzlers, it makes sense to target this entry barrier. Some ways to do this are via easier and more approachable puzzles; a hunt which will take a couple of hours is more likely to attract participants than one which will take a couple of days. Maintaining a social element to the activity also makes the event a lot more enjoyable; real-time local events are a good way to implement this (though perhaps online instead of in-person, given the current circumstances), since it's a lot more fun to compete against people you know in real life than against random team names on a leaderboard.

  Of course, more challenging hunts are still an important part of the puzzle scene; while most have a higher difficulty level, an introductory round with gentler puzzles is also a good way to make the hobby more accessible, allowing a solver to feel satisfied that they’ve finished something even if they don’t start or get all the way through the second round.

  Finally, we think one important distinction to make during outreach is to expose people to puzzles without strong-arming them into participation or future involvement; it's very easy to wind up telling someone “trust me, it'll be fun”, which—while true—isn't the best way to get someone to commit a weekend afternoon to an activity that may be completely new to them. Run smaller local events, and bring puzzles to puzzlers!

Q: What DP stands for and how did you name your crew?
Q: How did you choose the name “DP” for the hunt?

• kt3: doesn’t particularly denote panything
• EpicToast: drawn-out procrastination
• Level 51: “DP” presents dedicated puzzle designers’ pipe dream: produce decent puzzles, draw / persuade debutant puzzlers, deepen “puzzle denizen” pool.
• Idontknow: Endogenous, quite emotional quarreling, er, questioning

Future Puzzling

Puzzle Hunt Calendar is a great place to find other upcoming puzzlehunts. One of the hunts we’re looking forward to is Matt and Emma’s Birthday Bash, which is coming up in about a month and at least partially run by our first-place team.

Thanks for playing!