Wow, this looks incredible! Puzzle 2 and the final message seem perfect, I was worried they'd be impossible to get right. I played through levels 7-10 and they seem great as well. Puzzle 7 was actually a lot of fun to do without knowing french -- the logic for KAYAK is really great, seeing the k clue and connecting it to the only possible other k. I think I made the palindromes too easy in my version.
I greatly enjoyed the words ESERPACATROT and NOIL, and SPAM is a good choice for a red herring. I was happy to see the Obelisk shape and the two half-fish-half-hourglass things. Oh, and the scorpion stinger blot! I almost missed it. Great blot shapes overall, mine were a bit repetitive and chaotic.
I assume it's just a coincidence, but I like that the center of #9 apparently spells "I thought" in Portuguese. (In mine, I made it so the center would say "Le remains" as a vague hint, in terrible half-french, to look at leftover letters in reading order.) It also worked out nicely that BALANCE and MARS get to appear twice -- I wonder if that'll make #4 easier or harder!
It looks like you pretty much got everything important in there -- and even some little things like KEY/TOUCHE being a confusingly vague category name! I just noticed two potential errors:
- What word is the first P11 on puzzle 1? That slot should match the gingerbreadman glyph, but PAINDEPICE is 10 letters long.
- #10 seems to have an extra S in SESTERCESS... unless it's "poissons"? (Incredible anadrome by the way!)
And then I have a few small suggestions:
- To make the other fake blots on puzzle 5 feel more fair, add a silly fake blot in the corner after t18 (as though it could be t180).
- I would add a glyph to puzzle 8. Perhaps something like [image]
- CANCER can initially be placed 3 different ways (in the same general area), which is valid but may be annoying. (Jupiter's ambiguity, in contrast, feels okay IMO because it has a nice orthogonal shape.) That said, maybe it's useful to have suspiciously ambiguous placement at that point in the book.
When you're ready, go ahead and put the book on your own account, so you can update it or respond to feedback if desired, and have a French comment section. I will link to it in the description, probably "French translation available at chapeltok.itch.io/whatever". Feel free to keep your chapeltok.itch.io link on the title page if you like.
Thanks again for making this! It was kinda wild to see my own book but different, and I'm glad more people will get to play it. (My next puzzle book will be much, much easier to translate.)
By the way, I got most of my anacycles/anadromes/semi-palindromes by piecing together bits from https://foxhugh.com/word-lists/list-of-heteropalindromes/ and some list of palindromes I forget. As for BONE-based timekeeping, I think I got it from https://www.history.com/articles/ancient-timekeeping. Wikipedia categorizes these bones as "tally sticks" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick) and Google says "tally stick" would just be "baton de pointage", so BATON is good!