Messaging

Objective

Learn how to customize the complete player experience for your puzzle, from start to finish, including messages, visual elements, audio effects, and puzzle attribution.

These are the settings available under the Messaging tab during puzzle creation and when editing existing puzzles.

What You Can Customize

You can customize text messages, puzzle attribution, visual elements, and audio effects for your individual puzzles. Each setting applies only to the specific puzzle you're editing.

Category	Features
Start Experience	Start message, standard pop-up
Pause Experience	Pause message
Completion Experience	Completion message, completion sound, completion animation
Puzzle Attribution	Author name, author email, author homepage, copyright message
Visual Messaging	Background image, thumbnail image, social sharing image, empty box image
Audio Messaging	Correct answer sound, wrong answer sound

Series defaults

When you create a puzzle as part of a series, you can use series defaults to inherit messaging settings from your series configuration. This ensures consistent messaging across all puzzles in your series while still allowing individual puzzle customization when needed.

The "Use series defaults" toggle appears for Start and Completion experiences and is enabled by default. When enabled, your puzzle will automatically use the start and completion experiences you've configured for the entire series in the Series Settings.

If you want this specific puzzle to have different start or completion experiences than the series default, you can toggle this off and customize the messages just for this puzzle.

Start experience

Set up a warm welcome for your players. Show a custom message to greet players and provide quick instructions when the puzzle is loaded. A well-crafted start message can significantly improve player engagement and set the right tone for your puzzle experience.

Start experience editor

Show standard pop-up

Enable this option to show a simple start screen with just the puzzle title and start button. This prevents the puzzle from auto-scrolling when embedded and requires players to click "Start" before beginning.

Start messages are highly customizable. You can:

• Format your text to have a different color, make it bold or underline it.
• Add images, or embed YouTube videos.
• Include Google Forms to the messaging dialog box to run a survey or collect information.
• Use the HTML view toggle at the top right of the panel if you'd like to directly edit the message.

Series defaults

Start experience settings can be inherited from your series configuration. See Series defaults for more details.

Pause experience

Keep players engaged with a pop-up when the puzzle is paused. Leave this empty if you don't want a pause message.

Pause experience editor

Completion experience

Make finishing a puzzle feel rewarding. Customize the completion pop-up with a message, and add a completion sound and animation.

Completion experience editor - message, animation, and sound settings

Series defaults

Completion experience settings can be inherited from your series configuration. See Series defaults for more details.

Completion sound

You can use a custom audio file URL for this, or choose from one of our preset sound effects. This audio is played when a solver has finished solving the puzzle, or revealed the puzzle solution.

Completion animation

Choose a celebratory animation that displays when players successfully finish your puzzle. You can select from preset options or disable animations entirely.

When enabled, the selected animation will display on the entire screen when the puzzle is completed successfully or when the player reveals the puzzle solution.

For WordroW puzzles however, completion animations only show if the player found the word. For Quiz puzzles, completion animations only show if the player answered all questions correctly.

Completion behavior

Completion sounds and animations are not displayed in contest mode.

Puzzle attribution

Use of puzzle attribution. Left: Author name below the game grid; Right: in the series picker

Puzzle attribution can be used to credit the authors of your game, and allow your players to connect with them. For each game, you can specify:

1. Author name: The name appears below the game grid. If you are using a series picker, certain styles will display this information. By default, this field is automatically populated with the login name. If the author is someone other than the person who logged in, you can change this to their name. To omit the name, delete the author name from the author name field.
2. Author email address: The email address of the author/puzzle writer.
3. Link to author's home page: If specified, the author's name shown below the game grid is linked to this webpage.
4. Copyright message: This is displayed when a player clicks on "Support" using the hamburger menu at the top left of a puzzle.

Changing puzzle attribution

Live Example

Here's a live example of the start, pause, and completion experiences in action:

Try it out:

• Start message: Should be visible when the puzzle loads, or click the info button to relaunch it
• Pause message: Click the timer next to the hamburger menu (three lines) to pause and see the pause experience
• Completion message: Click "Assist" then "Reveal grid" to see the completion experience: animation, sound as well as the message!
• Attribution: Author name shows under the puzzle and in the start message. Copyright shows in the start message, or click hamburger menu and then Support to see it.

Visual messaging

Puzzles are more engaging with the addition of visual elements. We encourage you to explore the potential of adding visual customizations to your games.

Visual messaging refers to customizations that affect the look and feel of your puzzles. You can customize the following elements:

Background image

Customize the background image that appears behind the game. This can be used to set the overall theme or atmosphere of your puzzle.

Thumbnail image

Set a custom thumbnail image that will be displayed in the series picker. This helps players identify your puzzle when browsing through available games.

For best results, follow these specifications when creating your thumbnail images:

Size and format requirements:

• Full icon size: 40 x 40px with 4px border radius
• Actual icon area: 34 x 34px with 1px border radius
• Supported formats: SVG, JPG, PNG

Light and dark mode examples:

Light mode

Dark mode

Social media sharing image

Define a custom image that will be visible when your players share the puzzle on social networks. This helps maintain your brand presence across social media.

Empty box image

For games with empty boxes (such as crosswords), you can customize the appearance of these empty spaces with your own image.

Visual messaging demo: backdrop image, custom empty box image

Visual messaging highlights. Left: custom thumbnail inside the series picker; Right: custom image for sharing on social networks

For each visual messaging field, you can either provide a custom image URL or choose from our preset options.

Changing the visual messaging of the puzzle

Managing Puzzle Media

The PuzzleMe platform allows you to use your media in several places. Some examples of media usage include using a puzzle backdrop image, images or audio inside crossword or Word Search clues, images for a Picdoku game, and game completion sounds. If you are on the Professional or Enterprise Plans, you can upload your media files into PuzzleMe. If you are on the Personal Plan, you will have to host them on a public website and provide the URL to PuzzleMe.

Example links

A puzzle picker with custom thumbnail images for a puzzle

A crossword with a background image. Try sharing this puzzle to see a custom share image.

An example crossword with a custom image for empty boxes

Audio messaging

These settings can be used to add audio effects to your puzzles. They are available under the Audio messaging section.

Audio messaging settings

Correct answer audio

This field takes an audio file URL as input. This audio is played whenever a correct word is entered. (Available for crossword, word search, and quiz puzzles)

Wrong answer audio

This field takes an audio file URL as input. This audio is played whenever a wrong word is entered. (Available for crossword, word search, and quiz puzzles)

Jigsaw-specific audio

For jigsaw puzzles, you can set:

• Piece connection audio: Played when pieces are successfully connected
• Piece scatter audio: Played when pieces are scattered or moved

Audio requirements

• The following audio file formats are supported - MP3, OGG, X-WAV, WMA and M4A
• While we do not enforce a file size limit, the audio file is loaded each time your solvers load the puzzle. Thus it is essential to choose a small audio file. You can either
  • Use a small duration audio clip
  • Use an audio file with a lower bitrate

Example

Click here for an example quiz with correct and wrong answer sounds.

Audio Rights

Please ensure you have the right to use the audio in your puzzles. If you don't have the rights, consider using alternative sources of royalty free music.

How to customize messaging

General steps for all messaging options:

1. When creating a new puzzle, access the Messaging tab in the creator form. If editing an existing puzzle, find your game in the dashboard, click Edit Game, then navigate to the Messaging tab.
2. In the Messaging tab, locate the desired panel (Start experience, Pause experience, Completion experience, Puzzle attribution, Visual messaging, Audio messaging, etc.).
3. Enter your desired text and/or other elements and configure any specific options.
4. Click the "Update Game" button at the bottom of the page.

Puzzle files

If you are uploading a puzzle file, you can also set some of its attributions and visual messaging offline before uploading.

Setting attributions and messaging in Crossword Compiler

If you are using Crossword Compiler:

1. Please select "Information" from the "File" menu.
2. A "Puzzle information" dialog box will pop open. Click on the "Puzzle Info" tab.
3. Add the attributions and save the puzzle file. The table below lists what fields in Crossword Compiler map to what fields in PuzzleMe.
4. Upload the puzzle file. The attributions you added will automatically be extracted from the puzzle file and applied to your imported puzzle.

Crossword Compiler field	PuzzleMe setting
Title	Game title
Author	Author name
Copyright	Copyright message
Description	Start Message

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Image Credits

Media attributions/credits for the ones used in the puzzle demo.

1. Christmas wreath: Christmas icons created by Umeicon - Flaticon

2. Background: Image by Freepik

3. Reindeer: Reindeer icons created by Graphiqa - Flaticon

FAQ

I want to show a video in the end message. How do I do that?

A: Fun question! You can embed a video by inserting a direct YouTube URL or by using the 'Insert Hyperlink' function to link to a video hosted on your own server. Additionally, videos hosted on third-party platforms such as Vimeo or Dailymotion are supported. Ensure that the video URL is publicly accessible to guarantee proper playback.

How should I optimize images for web use?

A: Use light images optimized for the web, and serve them from a fast server. Using heavy images would slow down the page load speed.

What size should grid images be?

A: If you would like to use an image in the grid, ensure it is no larger than 100kB.