About

With the success of last year’s Golden Fox Idol Treasure Hunt project, Fox, Keir, and new member Zero set off again to produce an on-theme treasure hunt for FWA 2024 that would provide con-goers with a fun souvenir and prize for finding us in the crowds. We carried over the premise from last year: con-goer finds an artifact in the convention space, opening the artifact reveals a few trinkets and a scroll, the scroll leads the finder to in turn find us where they can get another prize for doing so.

Design

FWA 2024’s theme was announced as “Furry University 2” which…was a little disappointing given how much fun last year’s theme was (because who doesn’t love Indiana Jones style adventure?). We toyed around with the ideas of tiny backpacks as artifacts but ended up settling on hollow, college textbooks. These would be big enough to contain the scroll with finder instructions, but also a few stickers, a button or two, and a piece of candy which would - we hoped - indicate that it was free to be picked up and kept. We not only wanted people to be able to find us at the convention itself, but also online and so including a note on how to get in touch with us was also a desire.

One of the more difficult issues from last year also needed resolution: restricting people from potentially double-dipping and claiming more than their share by presenting the finder’s scroll twice. Last year we attempted to do this with a paw-shaped hole punch, but Big Fumbly Paws don’t work well with that at all and we ended up having to break our suiting silence to instruct people to tear off a corner of the scroll. So it was decided that we could wire something up that would beep to indicate when a finder was “good” or “bad” and not have it be dextrously demanding. We honestly don’t think people being sneaky and claiming multiple prizes is ever going to be an issue given how good natured congoers are, but it’s still a wise idea and would also permit us to track how many total finders we got which is ideal considering how convention chaos causes the days’ memories to blur together.

We also wanted to improve on the prize from last year slightly (a button and Starbucks gift card) by including a durable item along with some other fun convention goodies.

Creating The Books

The textbooks ended up going through two different hinge designs before we settled on one that took tiny nails as the hinge pins. We ended up mass producing these over the course of a solid month of 3D printing their three parts: bottom cover, white inner paper, and hinged top cover.

Fox created four amazing book covers that we applied as stickers: one for the cover, one for the spine, and a third “uwused” sticker to give them the perfect college bookstore used-book appearance.

Tracking People Finding Us

To solve the issue of Big Fumbly Paws interacting with hole punches/corner tears for tracking, we added RFID stickers to the corners of the paper scrolls and wired up an Arduino to an NFC reader and a piezo beeper. This got incorporated into the lid of a 3D printed box with magnetic latch that could hold three prize bags at a time. When a finder presented the scroll, we would simply pass the corner of it over the reader-spot on the box, it would beep a code (two short for ‘accepted’, three very long beeps for ’not accepted’) and it would track the find in an array held in the Arduino’s EEPROM.

People Finding Us Online

To help people find us online, we created a receipt generator that uses the Adafruit thermal printer library for python. Receipts randomly pulled from a list of pun-inspired book titles ensured everyone got different, terrible puns to groan over. A QR code at the bottom of the receipt included a link to a special bookstore website which includes a very silly “commercial” for the bookstore along with our contact information. Calling the working phone number yielded a silly outgoing recorded message and the ability for the user to leave us a voicemail in reply.

The Prize

We assembled thirty-five total prize bags for people who found us, all containing the requisite Starbucks giftcard and themed finder’s button, along with some fruit snacks, a light-up wrist band, silly erasers, a paw print-shaped bottle opener, and stickers.

New this year was an anodized aluminum “membership card”. This was based off an idea of having custom challenge coins included to go along with the giant prize button as a long-term, collectible keepsake. A receipt included with the prize bag also included a QR code with a link to our about us page.

Deploying

Over the course of the convention, all thirty-five books got deployed around to tables and walkways at various locations largely centered around the atrium and marquis levels of the Atlanta Marriott hotel. Three on Wednesday night, four on Thursday night, twelve on Friday, another twelve on Saturday, and four on Sunday. Most locations had historically been places where people would leave stickers, buttons, and flyers for anyone to pick up.

Results

Out of the thirty-five books distributed all across the convention, the total number claimed by finders was…seven. Which was not great and a significant downturn from last year. After hearing that FWA 2024 topped 15,000 people, though, we think this was due to a number of things, notably that it is just so difficult to stumble across people. This was confirmed by a few people who stated that had been looking for us for days, including two people who had found us last year and had kept their eyes open since day one in their attempts to find us despite not even having found an artifact this year. Also having expanded into multiple levels of the Hilton, the odds of running across us were very reduced.

We also watched a few people interact with the books and it appears that it’s possible the receipt threw people off – some opened the book, read the receipt and then…put it back inside and pushed the book aside without even attempting to open the scroll. A lot of people just aren’t curious but perhaps the artifact too much like someone’s property that they shouldn’t have taken?

Technical Stuff What We Learned

• direct drive conversion on 3D printer is a very good thing
• laser etching requires so, so much trial and error
• there’s a reason stamps have that squishy foam between the wood block and rubber
• thermal printers don’t have much print buffer

Puzzle Design Stuff We Learned

• a lone object on a table might be too mysterious to pick up
• too much information in an artifact is too off-putting
• no one will call a telephone number in a video or on a receipt without being prompted to
• “seeding the table” helps a lot with people picking stuff up
• it’s good and okay if someone sees you drop an artifact off
• you can cram a lot of PLA prints into carry on luggage and TSA is cool with it

Challenges for Next Year

It looks very much like FWA will cross the 16,000 person mark next year making this even more of a difficult project. We’re not giving in, though, and we’re considering some options for helping people find us better. We’re going to take artifact design and placement a lot more heavily this year, but we’re also considering providing a specific area and time(s) to find us to make it more easy for people who want to find us to do so. We’re also considering distributing a lot more artifacts next year although this means potentially limiting the number of finder’s prizes simply due to volume and cost considerations – it might be that we only have a limited number of prizes rather than a 1:1 ratio of them to artifacts and if you don’t manage to get one before they run out then…well, you got a neat artifact to keep at least!

Credits

Fox: book cover designs, sticker design, scroll design

Zero: video ideas, project inspiration, lots of problem solving

Keir: 3D printed book design, RFID prize box scanner, bad code, silly website and video

Last modified on 2024-05-14