Behind the scenes: building a camel quiz
Every choice in this quiz was deliberate — the seven questions, the fixed formula, the deterministic scoring, the original artwork. Here's the design story.
Start with the formula, not the questions
Most quizzes are built questions-first: write fun questions, then figure out scoring later. We went the other way. The scoring system came first — 20 starter camels plus seven answers worth +2 to +12 — because the formula is the product. A joke quiz lives or dies on whether its number feels earned, and earned requires fixed, inspectable math. Once the formula existed, every question had to justify its place in it.
Seven questions, sixty seconds
We tested longer versions. Every question past the seventh cost finishers without adding fun — attention is the scarcest resource on the internet, and a novelty quiz that overstays its welcome becomes homework. Seven questions take about a minute, which is exactly the length of the joke. Each question earned its slot; the eighth didn't.
Traits, not looks — a real decision
Early drafts had the standard appearance questions. They were cut for three reasons: they're less funny (being teased about your humor beats being graded on your face), they're less kind (nobody's looks should be ranked by a quiz), and they're less fair (appearance questions inevitably drift toward separate rules for different people). The trait-only design is the quiz's identity — we wrote about it properly here.
Deterministic on purpose
Randomized scoring would have been easier — one line of code, infinite variety. We chose fixed arithmetic instead, because a calculator that gives different answers to the same input isn't a calculator. Determinism also enables the best features: the per-answer breakdown, the one-answer retake experiment, and fair compare showdowns. Trust is a feature.
Original everything
The camel logo is drawn from scratch (SVG, no stock, no clip art). The questions were written for this quiz, not adapted from another. The tier titles — Desert Drifter through Sultan of the Sands — were workshopped until they made us laugh out loud, which is the only QA process that matters for comedy.
No tracking, by architecture
The quiz runs entirely in your browser. There's no server endpoint to receive your answers, no database to store them in, no analytics pipeline to feed. Privacy isn't a policy here — it's the absence of machinery. The privacy page is short because the system is simple.
What we'd do differently
Honestly? Very little. If we rebuilt it tomorrow, we'd keep the formula, the seven questions, and the sixty seconds. We might add an eighth question — and then we'd cut it again. The eighth question never survives.