For her birthday slumber party, my daughter asked for a scavenger hunt she and her friends could play together. The girls love solving problems, and my goal was to contain the chaos of eight tweens running through my house. I also wanted elements of the scavenger hunt to mirror my daughter somehow. Thus, the idea of a narrative mystery scavenger hunt was born.

The Mystery of the Missing Magical Gemstone

Written over a couple of nights as I wound down the day, "The Mystery of the Missing Magical Gemstone" was born. The premise is that an explorer, Dr. Penelope Explorer, hosts a dinner party with eleven guests (my daughter was turning eleven) to reveal the Magical Tanzanite Gemstone (Tanzanite is a December birthstone). But then the gemstone went missing, and all eleven guests became suspects!

Gameplay

The girls divided themselves into two teams of detectives. Each team was given a map of our house showing which rooms they were responsible for searching.

In each room, the girls would find a riddle they had to decode to find a physical object linked to a suspect. Each physical object has a QR code linked to a suspect.

The Suspects

Each of the eleven suspects shares a trait with my daughter - a painter because she likes to paint. A dog walker because she likes dogs, etc. No, the butler isn't one of my daughter's traits, but I kept him in the game because I liked him - maybe it's me, lol. Using an iPad (or any device), the girls watched a short video of each suspect, giving clues about whether they were the thief.

Name the Thief!

Once the girls watched all the suspect's videos, they split into their teams to deliberate and guess who the thief was. But it's not over yet! The thief has one final riddle that reveals where they hid the gemstone. The girls work as a group, searching for the gemstone hidden in the house.

Wrapping up

Overall, the game was a success. The girls got a laugh out of the videos. They loved searching the house, decoding the riddles, and deliberating over who the thief was. The effort of putting this scavenger hunt together was definitely worth the reward of watching them be excited and have fun.

"Yeah, it was fun. I liked it."

Kiran, Tween

Behind the Scenes

After the writing was complete, I filmed myself acting out all the characters using the selfie camera on my iPhone. Because, I'm not an actor and can't remember lines, I used a Teleprompter app on the phone.

I used Midjourney to create the characters. After landing on an animated style I liked, I created portraits of all twelve characters, making sure they felt consistent as well as the environments they were in. Making sure the characters were diverse and gender equal was another aspect of character creation.

I used Runway ML's "Act One" to create the animations. My selfie videos were the "drivers" that Act One used to animate the portraits.

I brought MP3s of my voice performance to Eleven Labs. Using their audio-to-audio feature, I created AI voices driven by my performances.

I brought the final animations and voices into Adobe Premiere, where I assembled and trimmed the assets to create the final videos.

I uploaded all the final videos to Frame.io - a platform I use to share videos in my professional work. Using the Chrome browser, I created QR codes that link to each video.

In Adobe Illustrator, I vectorized the QR codes for the best print fidelity, printed all the codes, and attached them to the objects. I used Adobe InDesign to lay out the riddles and printed them on card stock so they could stand up when we placed them around the house.