When it comes to games, I am a sucker for two things: a good story, and random easter eggs. The latter—not to be confused with those hidden around a garden during holy week—are known in gaming as fun, little inside jokes or hidden features not immediately apparent to the player.
If you made it this far, congratulations once again. I hope that figuring out how to get to this egg has not interrupted your sleep cycle—or worse yet, your laundry washing.
Since Cousin’s Quest itself has no “plot,” or “story,” I figured this was an opportunity to hit two birds with one stone. That is—I snuck in this easter egg, which shares the story of how the game came to be.
A few weeks before Edition 1 was made, I stumbled upon this video during another ill-advised, late-night, Youtube binge. After a few chuckles, I shared it with some friends who judged its strange premise differently than I did. Where I saw a funny clip, they saw creepy nightmare fuel.
Real friends are those who remind us how twisted our senses of humor could be at times.
On the video’s description box, a link to a fake website appeared. And upon further research, it turns out that if one entered a specific log-in credential on it, other “similar” recordings would appear, deepening the mystery of the original material.
It was at this moment that flashbacks to online scavenger hunts lit up in my brain. The gears began to click, and I knew I had found the inspiration that escaped me over the past weeks. It had been a plan to add “something” to the Cousin site for a while, but I couldn’t quite place what it would be—until now.
Immediately after, I began work on the first riddle drafts. The early versions were hurriedly typed on the phone, on the way to work. Even if the lines didn’t rhyme right away, (or if it used unnecessary BIG WORDS) the primary goal was to get the idea down in writing. The “polishing” would be for later.
The Dev, a childhood friend, was instrumental in helping formulate the game’s mechanics. He offered advice and insight into the set-up, and was the perfect teacher for one who had limited understanding with working the back-end of a website.
(After having to deal with all of my noob questions, I believe he deserves to be canonized as the new patron saint for patience.)
Initially, the game was designed without an instructions screen. It would simply be shared, and users would be left to figure out what to do on their own. Sink or swim, as they say. But as I transferred the riddles onto the platform, I realized how certain answers had interesting quirks. Would “Session Road” be written as “SessionRoad,” “session road,” “Session rd.” or just “session?”
With the mechanics hinging on exact answers, an instructions page with rules on capitalization, extra words, and spaces had to be created. This led to some riddles getting cut, like this one:
The answer would have been “igorotgarden,” but for some reason, it felt too “clunky” considering I had already instructed not to add the word “park” to answers. So, why would one add “garden” but not “park?” And then if one can’t add garden, would the solution then awkwardly be only, “igorot?”
So, in the spirit of making life simpler, I cut the riddle and replaced it. I also made sure to repeat the most important rules, a la fight club style, to avoid any misunderstanding moving forward.
After setting the pages in place, a call to another friend was in order. The Minero, a long-time collaborator with other creative endeavors outside of Cousin, was often the source for drawings better than the pathetic stick figures I drew. When asked for something “adventure-y” or “Indiana Jones-y,” he sent a rough draft, which I immediately OK’d (because it already looked better than anything I could come up with.)
To top it off, he added the brilliant idea of leaving the face blank for me to “paste” above after. A few modifications to his scanned copy—and some photoshopped tape later— the cover image was ready.
With the image uploaded, the last step was to test the game and make sure that any glitches, bugs, or mistakes found would be excused with “Hindi, uhh, ano, sadya yan.”
The few kabsats who were tasked to check the initial prototype also served as litmus tests for a question’s complexity—providing a more precise idea on how to arrange it via difficulty. (Also, they were also automatically disqualified from any rewards or recognition once the game went live.)
When none of them could finish the quest, and the majority of their responses looked like this:
It truly felt like the universe whispered, “The quest is ready.”
We went live a few hours later at 8 AM that Saturday morning. 16 hours later, I had kabsats complaining about losing sleep over it.
Talk about making a Frankenstein.
Cousin Quest’s riddles, photo edits, and web arrangement provided by Cousin from Baguio
Illustration provided by The Minero
Game mechanics and web support provided by The Dev