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Case Study 01 / 03 · Secret City Adventures · Staff Training

The Art of HintingTeaching judgment to people who already know how to perform

Secret City Adventures is an independent Toronto company that merges escape rooms with immersive, site-specific theatre. I spent several years working there as an actor (in fact, I still make appearances from time to time). Due to my experience as an educator and facilitator, I quickly became the company's head trainer. Most new hires come from acting, improv, and/or customer service backgrounds, so they already know how to perform and be present with an audience. What they don't know yet is game facilitation. Specifically, hinting: when to step in, when to hold back, and how to nudge a stuck team without robbing them of the joy of discovery. Making hinting-related judgment calls is the hardest part of the role to hand off.

When I left to take a full-time role in L&D, I was commissioned to build training materials for onboarded "Clue Staff." Initially, I built the prototype in Articulate. Then, I rebuilt it from scratch with HTML/CSS/Javascript so the client could use it without purchasing an LMS.

Needs Analysis Curriculum Design Articulate Rise → HTML / CSS / JS Scenario-Based Assessment GitHub Pages

The Brief

Hinting is the one part of a Clue Staff member's job that new staff have no prior experience with. Teams encounter the exact same puzzles and need completely different responses — one might just need a small nudge, while another is five seconds from a breakthrough and prefers to be left alone, and a third won't have any fun without constant positive reinforcement. Many Clue Staff develop this instinct over months and years on the floor, but still benefit from organizational knowledge transfer of key principles (informally, before this tool).

My job was to distill practices from our highest-performing, most experienced staff did instinctively and turn it into something teachable..

The Constraints

Before I designed anything, I sat down with the senior manager for a formal needs-assessment interview. Some constraints and obstacles became clear:

  • No existing training documentation — over a decade of informal "best practices" being transferred informally through discussion, but not a single document capturing this organizational knowledhe.
  • No computers for staff to take the training with, so any tool would have to live on staff's own phones.
  • No LMS (and once I left, no Articulate subscription either) — whatever I built had to survive without a budget and without me.

The Build

I prototyped the curriculum in Articulate Rise first — it's fast for structuring lessons and easy to put in front of the manager for feedback. But Rise content needs somewhere to live. So, I rebuilt the entire module from scratch with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, hosted free on GitHub Pages, designed mobile-first since staff would complete it on their own phones. Every interaction — the sorting activities, the true/false scenarios, the feedback states — became custom code. That's more work than a port, but it meant the client owned their training outright: free to host, free to edit, no dependency on a subscription or on me.

The Final Assessment

The lessons teach principles that have to be used sensitively and flexibly, and the final assessment is where those principles meet a range of realistic scenarios.

It's built as 22 scenarios across three phases that mirror the real timeline of a 60-minute game: Beginning (0–10 minutes), Mid-Game (20–40 minutes), and Endgame (48–60 minutes). Each phase changes both the interaction and the stakes. Early on, staff sort responses as appropriate or not. By mid-game, they're assessing whether a tactic is a good call. By the endgame, it's true-or-false judgment calls with the clock running out — and the principles from the lessons don't always agree with each other anymore. That's deliberate. Here's one of them:

Phase 3 of 3 · Endgame · 4:00 remaining
It's someone's birthday and the group has been incredibly fun to host. They're on the final puzzle with 4 minutes left, making good progress — but suddenly they start second-guessing themselves and backtracking in the wrong direction. They really want to win.
"It's okay to give them a gentle nudge like 'You were on the right track before — keep going that direction!' since they're so close and it's a special occasion."

One of 22 scenarios from The Ultimate Hinting Challenge — try the rest in the live assessment.

Why it's in this portfolio

Judgment calls. Building an assessment that actually tests for situational awareness — rather than just restating the lessons that came before it — was the most important design decision in the whole project, and it's the reason this piece opens the portfolio.

Result

The module's reception led to three additional contracts, covering other elements of the facilitator role.

Open the Training Module → Try the Full Assessment →