How I suddenly began swimming in takes

Before you wonder what this blog is about, I named my pool "Takes"

Okay no, so basically, within the last month or so, the amount of takes I have doubled. What exactly happened to me? How did I get here? Maybe I hacked? Let's unravel this mysterious progress made shall we?

If I recall correctly, I first discovered JetPunk on March 2nd, 2020. I was looking forward to playing a quiz where I had to name all the countries in the world, and soon I created my account as I found this website interesting. Then a few days later, I posted on subreddit for the first time showing off my first badge - the 196 badge. In the comments there, I was asked whether I have made any quizzes myself. And there my journey to make quizzes begun...

My first quiz actually wasn't that bad, I'd consider it a fairly decent quiz, especially for a new user. If you are wondering, it's Roman Numeral Encoder. It was clean, has a thumbnail, doesn't have wacky CSS and was an original idea. Not gonna lie, I'm still pretty proud of myself not outputting literal garbage content in the early days.

Okay enough early history, let's move onto May 2020. Around May 20th, I was looking through the site and found no quizzes covering all cities of my country - China. So I was thinking, since I can use the dot placer tool to place down circles, this quiz wouldn't be too hard to make despite how bad I was at SVG. But, as soon as I began this project, I realized how bored I'd get inputtingN nearly 700 rows of coordinates. Hence, about 10 days into the working, I asked for help on the JetPunk Discord server, and there, Fuse responded to my request and volunteered in adding coordinates to the spreadsheet I created. In fact, in 6-7 consecutive hours, he actually filled a few dozen more lines than I did. As we finished editing the spreadsheet, I put the data into the dot placer tool and generated the map. I then released my first collaborated project and original SVG quiz - Every City in China on a Map. This was a milestone in my history of quiz-making and I'm proud of that till this date. Although the map doesn't look that good, but there's an update coming soon so stay tuned!

As I've made too many quizzes with the dot placer, I've gotten somewhat bored of those quizzes and began eyeing on more advanced quizzes. I asked for help yet again and this time I learnt to divide objects from MiracleMax. Though this sounds simple, it was truly game-changing. With this knowledge in mind, I released All Modern-Day Countries Ever Controlled by Chinese People on January 25th, 2021. This quiz immediately became my most nominated quiz in just an hour or so after release. I was super glad and made a sequel to this the next day - All Modern-Day Countries Ever Controlled by French People (which is now featured through nominations). Seeing how successful this had gotten, I began making more and more of this series...

Pause. Let's rewind a bit. Dekkie joined the server just 3 days after I released the first quiz of that series. She was interested in that idea and as I released the third quiz, she asked for the permissions to make quizzes of this series, to which I said yes. Dekkie then proceeded to make a load of these, and Quizmaster noticed and featured the quizzes on Prussia and Belgium. This has definitely brought some to search for more of this topic and gave me a little boost.

Here comes the most important part, the User Spotlight feature was introduced mid-March. My Turkic quiz was amongst the first 10 quizzes to be featured under the spotlight. I was more than happy. That quiz all of a sudden exploded in takes and was the 77th most taken English quiz of the day. To my surprise, on the 3rd day of this feature's existence, I had my second spotlight, this time being the French quiz which I've mentioned earlier this blog. It suddenly went from 41 nominations to 62 in just a single day and my quiz was instantly visible from the top of the nominated quizzes page. It was a such massive boost that got me crazy...

Then something funny happened. Quizmaster featured 5 quizzes on March 22nd. My quiz was previously the 6th most nommed quiz and all of a sudden it topped the leaderboard thanks to that act.

As the attention began rolling in, the projects grew bigger and bigger. On March 25th, after about half a year spent mostly procrastinating making the map, I've released what is probably my highest-effort quiz yet:

Countries of Asia in 1300 on a Map.

This did not gain as much nominations as some other quizzes I've released right away, but it will soon be on the spotlights, so let's hope that goes well :D

Before ending this blog, there's some other quizzes of great importance that I did not cover in the blog. Here they are:

- The entire Badly Drawn series

- Terrestrial Biomes of China

- The rest of the All Modern-Day Countries Ever Controlled by ... series

Thanks a lot for staying with me till the end! As a reward, you may claim a cookie at the center of the Andromeda Galaxy.

Have a nice day :D