Before
Years ago, seeking a theme for some example puzzles to with Scott Royer's Anatomy of a Puzzle puzzlehunting how-to guide, I chose #, the "octothorpe" typographical symbol. The inspiration: Shady Characters, a book (back then, a blog) about some of the quirkier typographical symbols. This book wasn't just about #s: it also had @, ‽, ¶ etc. I'd idly noodled with the idea of coming up with puzzles for every symbol in the shift-numbers area of a USA keyboard… but that idea evaporated when I looked at the ( symbol and came up with zero ideas. But but the ampersand seemed like it had possibilities. So that was rattling around in the back of my head.
I had this conversation with a puzzle nerd: they liked Puzzled Pint because it gave them a way to spend time with some not-generally-a-puzzle-enthusiast person they cared about. And then I had a darned similar conversation with another puzzle nerd. Puzzled Pint had fallen off my radar: a couple of times I'd schlepped across town so I could meet with puzzle nerds and demolish a set of puzzles… in about the same amount of time I spent schlepping across town; I'd stopped going, stopped even bothering to check to see if it was at a nearby-not-so-much-schlepping bar each month; Yes, I'm a lazy terrible person. Puzzled Pint had fallen off my radar, but then these conversations showed me Puzzled Pint was, y'know, a force for good in the universe bringing people together and stuff.
Remember when I said, of Hunt for Justice…
So I wrote three rough-draft puzzles. Yes, Matt had only asked for one puzzle. But I'd once again run into an old issue: when coming up with wacky puzzle ideas, I couldn't be sure which of them were wacky-awesome and which were wacky-not-so-awesome. In this situation, I'll make three rough-draft puzzles. Three puzzles to give GC a choice. Rough-draft only because if I go to the trouble to make a puzzle really good, I can get attached to my ideas, and less ready to take feedback; Seeing as how I wasn't sure which of these ideas was best, it was too early to get attached to any of them.
… One of those rough-ideas was an idea for a word puzzle like a spiral word puzzle but with letters of an "answer message" smooshed in there. The H4J folks chose a different rough-idea, one that had a cool reason to include toys in their box-o'-puzzles. But after the H4J effort calmed down, I thought back to that smooshed spiral and…
There was this thought: the smooshed spiral could be a puzzle called Back & Forth. It could be one of a set of ampersand-themed puzzles. I had some other ampersand-y ideas rattling around from before, maybe it was time to start writing those down…
Writing
As I write this, the Puzzled Pint instructions for authors say
For first-time puzzled pint authors, we suggest writing just a bonus puzzle first. This will let us get to know your style, and you can become familiar with our puzzle editing process, which can be a bit rigorous.
I didn't read those instructions until after I'd written down a bunch of ampersand puzzles, whoopsie. So instead of sending in one puzzle, having a long-suffering puzzle editor look at one puzzle and give me feedback that I could keep in mind while writing lots of puzzles… instead of doing that, I eventually sent in a whole packet of puzzles without the benefit of feedback on one puzzle, whoopsie. Thus, this probably made more work for Neal, d'oh.
So… don't do what I did. But in the interest of jotting notes: here's what I did.
I had the back+forth idea. I wanted to use a puzzle that did some kind of &-et substitution. (The & symbol gets it shape from "Et", because "et" is Latin for "and". I am desperate to use my knowledge of Latin in puzzles or anything really so that I can fool myself into thinking that four years of studying a dead language wasn't a waste of time.) And pretty much any kind of "this and that" puzzle would work.
I needed a simple meta idea. Meta-puzzles can get complex: There's a temptation to use an especially gnarly idea for the meta so that teams' final memory of a puzzle set is overcoming this great challenge. But experience on weekend-long hunts shows how this can backfire: folks who have been awake for the past 40 hours might not be up for your especially-gnarly challenge, and thus their final memory of the hunt might be grumpily calling in to ask for a hint. Puzzled Pint has a different way this can backfire: folks who have been knocking back beers for the past couple of hours might not follow your especially-gnarly idea. Percolating through my memories, I thought of Patrick Berry's book Adventures in Puzzling. It had sets of puzzles with metas—and I remember thinking that the first couple of metas had been pretty simple. I pulled the book off the shelf and ripped off th saw how one of the meta ideas could inspire something via combination with something ampersand-ish.
For that back&forth puzzle, the way to design it was to choose a word, then figure out how to extend it by a few letters, then extend it by a few letters more. A skilled puzzle constructor like Nathan Curtis can do this "by hand". But when I tried, I got stuck a few times—I ended up writing a computer program to show me a bunch of choices. Maybe someday I'll be good enough at this stuff so I can just eyeball this stuff, but I'm not there yet…
Anyhow, I tinkered with puzzles on weekends. Progress was slow: I spent more time than I'd like to admit wondering "What was I thinking when I scribbled these notes last weekend?" and by the time I'd figured that out, there wasn't much time to work on things before it was time to pack up again. But then I got laid off and thus had uninterrupted time. Priorities, right?
Submission
I came up with a set's worth of puzzles plus some extra puzzles. Remember when I said before "…when coming up with wacky puzzle ideas, I couldn't be sure which of them were wacky-awesome and which were wacky-not-so-awesome. In this situation, I'll make three rough-draft puzzles." I didn't make three sets' worth of puzzles, but I did write some extras. This gave GC some "wiggle room." Plus it got me not-so-attached to rough-draft ideas: There was no way all of these ideas were getting in, so there was no reason for me to throw a nerd hissy-fit if one puzzle got turned down.
(Did you know that many movie titles have ampersands? In your head, it's "Mr and Mrs Smith" but when you look at the poster or IMDB entry or whatnot you realize it was "Mr & Mrs Smith" (2005) all along. That's the gist of one puzzle that didn't make the cut.)
I wrote in to Puzzled Pint GC saying that I had a set of too-many rough-draft puzzles for someone to look over and tell me which ones to discard and which ones to develop into not-so-rough drafts. I guess behind the scenes the GC folks figured out who would deal with me. Soon I heard back from Neal Tibrewala: he'd be the "PM" for this set of puzzles. Puzzled Pint GC has PMs, project managers: they're sort of like editors who also coordinate with playtesters, do page layout, and somehow keep progress ticking forward even if a puzzle author doesn't know how PP does things. This was good news for me: I'd had a chance to hang out with Neal volunteering at DASH in Austin a few years ago. If you're going to hear feedback about something, it's easier to hear it from someone you've met. Well, as long as they aren't a big jerk or something, I guess. And Neal isn't that, so yeah, good news.
I uploaded versions of the rough-draft puzzles for Neal to look at. A few days later, he scrounged up a solving partner and suffered through the set. Soon, he had feedback: a set of puzzles to use, a few puzzles to discard. Plus feedback on individual puzzles. Soon there was a mail thread per puzzle.
In general, I'd made the puzzles too complex for Puzzled Pint. I'd put in a recursive use-the-same-method-on-mini-answers-to-get-the-real-answer layer that turned a simple-idea puzzle into a two-hour grind. In another puzzle, I'd used a constraint in picking mini-answers that was very impressive… but didn't actually make the puzzle any more fun and furthermore led to some of those mini-answers being esoteric choices… Uhm, yeah. In my head I knew Puzzled Pint is looking for puzzles that are tractable to the somewhat inebriated and I remembered the ever-applicable Advice to/from a Puzzle Snob… but it was all too easy to fall into old habits and that's why it's good to have other folks around, e.g., Neal pointing out how these puzzles played out in practice compared to the usual PP puzzles.
There followed a round of edits.
Neal showed puzzles to other folks in the Puzzled Pint organization. There was one puzzle that relied on "common phrases". Now that Puzzled Pint has expanded into other countries, some puzzles built on a knowledge of "common phrases" have backfired since it turns out that some of those are actually Americanisms. Fortunately, Puzzled Pint doesn't just have players in those countries; it also has volunteers. A team of those lovely volunteers played through some of the dicier puzzles to check them for Americanisms. (Here, I was glad I'd kept my notes around when constructing puzzles. We didn't just send those volunteers the puzzle; from my notes, there were also some alternate phrases, so lovely volunteers could point out ones that worked better.)
Anyhow, there was this period of feedback and editing. The puzzles changed a lot, but that was part of my plan, starting with rough drafts. (I knew they'd have to change. I'd given puzzles answers that didn't fit in the meta-puzzle. This made sense because I'd started with "too many" puzzles; there wasn't "room" for all of their answers in the metapuzzle. But it meant that some of them would need to change so they could have different answers to "fit".)
Neal came up with a bunch of puzzle ideas. Like, feedback came back saying that some puzzle-layer didn't make sense, I'd mail to say "Uh, I dunno, I guess I will fix it by doing this" and Neal would say "Sure, or you could do that" where that was something that I wouldn't have ever thought of but it worked much better. Thanks to Neal, there's variety in this set of puzzles: I definitely have my go-to bag of tricks; he pointed out some tricks that I wouldn't normally think of. Oh! And Neal came up with the logo. And the hints. And made the online hint page work. And… Neal did a lot. I'm probably only aware of a fraction of it. There was a lot of stuff that I never had to worry about.
Final Push
Once the puzzles were in OK shape for the next round of playtesting, I thought I had a few months to sit back. The Puzzled Pint GCs have a list of upcoming themes so that puzzle authors can "claim" a theme and not worry that someone else steals their idea. (I didn't do this; Unsurprisingly, nobody stole ampersands as a theme. But if I'd chosen the latest hit movie or whatever, things might have gone differently.) It was a long list, so I figured there were a bunch of sets ahead of me. But Neal mailed me saying actually the ampersand set was further along than others he was herding. (Did I mention that being laid off is good for finding uninterrupted puzzle-writing time? It's true.) Sure thing.At this point, more Puzzled Pint volunteers playtested. (I'm not sure exactly who; all feedback went through Neal who anonymized things and perhaps softened harsh comments. But some of my spie friends in the PP organization messaged to say "Oh, you wrote puzzles!" and such.) This ferreted out some lurking red herrings and let Neal compute the difficulty ratings for puzzles.
Anyhow, a final set of revisions. And then quality control at Puzzled Pint caught some errors in the final set of revisions and there was the final final set of revisions. And then waiting for…
