WJ Family’s Making Mysteries (GC84YZF)

~ brought to you by flattery and guilt, applied liberally by bloodycool ~

Finding Inspiration for Puzzles

• Go with what you know—for themes and techniques
• e.g., maritime signal flags, sudoku, orthography
• Keep it simple to start
• New puzzle solvers don’t want a Hixon puzzle every time (e.g., GC3PPV9)
• 1-star difficulty puzzles help new people get into puzzle solving
• Adapt a puzzle to your theme
• e.g., sudoku w/ letters & some spell out geocaching terms
• Encode text / numbers with something other than letters (e.g., those maritime signal flags)
• A series of relatively simple puzzles on a theme can still be lots of fun!
• For a default theme, use geocaching!
• e.g., Pseudo-Crossword #2 (GC7CRQK) and #3 (GC7CRQQ) use some geocaching terms, coords instead of location names, and gratuitously geocaching-themed clues
• Creating puzzles from miscellaneous spare parts
• Combine things, for example:
• The Princess Bride : The Brute Squad—re-encode the same info (GC5FX94)
• It’s Got Layers, Like an Ogre—two independent encodings on top of each other (GC7HZ18)
• Repeat things
• e.g. Base64ⁿ (GC7HM8M)
• “Flatter”
• “Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.” —Charles Caleb Colton
• “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.” —Igor Stravinsky

Making Clues: Tools and techniques to help you create puzzles

• Tools to make puzzles are often the same tools you use to solve puzzles
• Crazy people build all sorts of neat tools
• Extra credit: build your own if you can
• See our Geocaching Puzzle Webtools
• OneLook, Wiktionary, and LogicalSolver are favorites
• Encode information directly or indirectly
• Direct: translate coords to French and rot13 them
• Indirect: solve puzzle to assign numbers to items, then alphabetize the items to get the order of the numbers
• Compromise: move the cache, fudge the coords, only encode the last 6, spell phonetically (“ate”) or make easy substitutions (“sevem”)
• Plan to generate too many clues
• Brute force search: if you need 6 clues, come up with 10 or 20 and take the best ones or the ones that work (mechanically or thematically)
• e.g. words that are anagrams of each other, or words that rot-13 each other, or words with the same vowel three times.
• For example, it might be easier to make geocaching-related clues for almanac than for cataract
• Red herrings are optional
• Nice: “red herring” or “nothing to see here”
• Less nice: “needy cellar payment”—WTF?
• Give good hints
• Don’t leave people with no way to start (unless it’s a 5-star difficulty and you like it that way)
• Not just in the Additional Hints, but in the title (Base64ⁿ), the description, and the puzzle itself
• For example, if you have 14 things that start with T, it’s not obvious you should alphabetize them, if they start with A-N, then it’s more obvious
• If you encode “N 39...” then solvers know they are on the right track.
• It’s a difficult balance—playtest!
• Take good notes!
• The best thing you can do for your sanity—and to help a puzzle solver who needs a hint a year or two after you publish a puzzle—is to write down how to solve your puzzle in the Personal Cache Note on your cache page.

Playtesting for Fun and Profit

• Well, there’s not really any profit in it, other than making your puzzles more fun
• You can never really tell how hard it is when you already know the answer
• Play test on yourself and others
• e.g., Do your sudoku from scratch to make sure it is solvable and roughly as easy/hard as you think it is—I solved Latin GeoSquare (GC782KZ) a dozen times.
• Find someone who likes puzzles and get them to do the puzzle with as little extra info as possible.
• Take your testers into account and maybe re-test
• TwoFinders asked me to try “Hark! Hark! Hark! ‘tis children’s music” (GC81GAX). I think it might be a 4-star puzzle, but lots of writing systems come up a lot in my work and hobbies, so I recognized it immediately and it was a 1-star for me.