itch.io

Glad it was a good surprise! 😄

No concrete plans for more at this stage, but we’re definitely considering it! Hearing people would be interested is useful info, thanks.

Hm, yes, that would be a bug! We should have made the level impossible to solve without collecting it. Sorry about that!

Indeed! As for spoilers, I feel we don’t need to be strict about them when discussing The Importance of Being Earnest. If folks don’t want to be spoiled on a 130-year-old play they can not check the thread until they’re caught up.

While I’m thinking about it - I’ll probably make separate discussion threads for each of the three acts, to give a little bit of structure, but I think we’ll be okay within that.

Anyway, to answer the question, Itch doesn’t have good spoiler tags, annoyingly, although there’s this technique: https://itch.io/t/2151831/adding-spoiler-text-to-your-game-description

It’s a totally valid complaint that the game itself doesn’t handle it! I would like to fix it if I ever make time to circle back to this game.

Yeah, I’m curious to see how it goes. I’m hoping that the new UI will help, because it always shows all the previous text (but lands you at the bottom to solve the most recent one) so the context is there if you scroll up. I hope everyone will let me know how it feels as we get a little bit further in.

Take it up with Oscar Wilde, my friend. 😄 I’m not going to edit the text, we’re just going to play through it.

With the Yliad arc wrapped up, Volume 2 of The Daily Spell will be serializing the Oscar Wilde play, The Importance of Being Earnest! I’m really excited for everyone to enjoy its rapid-fire quips and shenanigans (and as for me, I’ll be enjoying a break from writing every day!)

Important note: Volume 2 daily updates will only be available at the-daily-spell.com, not on itch. But since we have this forum, feel free to discuss the The Importance of Being Earnest puzzles and developments here.

Done! Thank you!

Yes, there will be a bonus puzzle this week!

Not sure about after that - one option is I can circle back and add bonus puzzles that take place during the earlier chapters of TDS. But I’d like to take a little break from writing puzzles/articles, too, so I’m not sure yet! A problem for next week me. 😄

Thanks for the input on the discord - I do think it would be nice to have, but haven’t really had time/energy to consider setting it up yet, but will definitely share via the newsletter/etc if I ever do.

I just made a little tweak to Wednesday’s article because I think something I meant to subtly hint at was instead totally obscure. (It probably still is, but oh well, I like having my little hints.)

Now Renna says, “We think the power from the accumulators was given form by some kind of animate spirit, even before the corruption of the distortions.” I wonder how a formless spirit ended up hanging around in Leoda? 😸

My plan is to keep this itch page for the Yliad story as a complete thing, and Volume 2 will have daily puzzles on the-daily-spell.com only. That saves me keeping multiple things in sync, while I also hope that people can still find this story on itch and enjoy it as a complete game.

I’ll probably still add a thread for Volume 2 in this community board, since may as well if people want to come back here to discuss. (And obviously I’ll be open to bug reports and feedback from either - it’s the same codebase.)

I’ve often wondered if I should start a Jamwitch discord server people could also use to discuss TDS, but I’m a little hesitant to take that on and not sure how many people really want to have to add a new discord server to their list, so it’s nice to have this community board as option for discussing the game!

Oh thank you for sharing! I’m glad that it worked well for you. I keep coming back to this question, it’s definitely something I want to think about more in future deduction games too.

Happy to hear you’re enjoying our games, thank you! 🙂

I’ll put a note in-game this week too, but for anyone who missed it in the newsletter, this is the last week of dispatches from Royal City! Starting from March 30 we’ll be embarking on Volume 2, which will be a very different story. I explained a bit more in a Bluesky thread as well as the newsletter.

Post your results and discuss the events of week 20, March 23-29, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine, including bonus puzzles.

Ooh I agree 100%, it was a pleasant surprise for me!

Thanks! I’m currently working on a UI update that will make things more responsive - should be out by the end of the week hopefully - and I’ll make sure to test iPhone mini.

Whoops! Fixed now, thanks for letting me know.

Dang it, that’s not scary at all! Thanks for letting me know, fixed.

Post your results and discuss the events of week 19, March 16-22, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine, including bonus puzzles.

Fixed, thanks!

Alas, I must reveal that Kitty is definitely gone. I didn’t mean it to be unclear, so I just updated the text to say “so don’t bring a familiar if you want to keep it.” Sorry for the false hope!

Completion times are only stored in browser local storage so there’s no way to get those back unfortunately.

Since this is a risk of using local storage, we do have Unlock All Past Puzzles under About the Game -> Manage data to reveal them all.

Hey! Unfortunately completion stats are saved to your browser local storage, and if something goes wrong there (for example: running out of space due to data stored by other sites) there’s not anything I can do. Sorry to say it’s just one of the risks of using browser storage.

So restoring your times isn’t possible, but you can reveal puzzles you’ve already solved. Under About the Game -> Manage data, you can reveal all puzzles, or you can do it one by one with the Reveal Solution button. (Were you in the middle of the archives? Considering adding a bulk reveal to the archives if that would help in this kind of case.)

Thank you for playing! I recently paused to calculate and realized the backlog has gotten quite hefty, so I’m happy to hear you stuck with it and enjoyed it!

How to balance this is something I think about a lot, so I’m happy to hear that the way it shows up is working for you, thank you!

Post your results and discuss the events of week 18, March 9-15, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine, including bonus puzzles.

That’s great to hear, thank you!

We shall see if I ever circle back to MFMT or if I have too many new ideas to work on. Right now I’m super busy with my daily word puzzle The Daily Spell, and the other half of Jamwitch, Rose, is busy with life stuff! But I at least am hoping to participate in Ludum Dare in mid-April. 🤞

Just happened across this and was intrigued to give it a shot! I really like this word puzzle and the story you told with it. It must be a great puzzle game since I really wanted to finish it despite finding typing each word multiple times not to be the ideal interface. 🙂 I ended up making my own tool to color the words by length and rearrange them, but then I had to tediously do all the swaps in the game. But I did, because the puzzle was really fun - using the word length to slowly piece together what fit semantically was super satisfying! And the ending was great!

Ah, I was hoping I’d have one more week before worrying about that! 😄 What device are you on, so I can test it? And.. does the “Today” button in the article navigation bar also overflow?

Will update the layout!

Post your results and discuss the events of week 17, March 2-8, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine, including bonus puzzles.

Ah, so sorry folks! Bit of a mix up here, I was not as on top of things as I wished to believe. 😅

I’ve pushed the correct puzzle and article to itch now. Players on the site might also have been affected if you had an open tab you hadn’t refreshed, but refreshing will fix it. And I will not be pushing any incomplete puzzles that I intend to replace later anymore!

Thanks for reporting!

Absolutely, I’m open to it! It might take me some time to add a translation into the code, but if you’re happy to provide the translation for free and you think there are players out there who would appreciate it, I’ll take it!

Let’s chat on Bluesky or Discord? I’m celia14.

Thank you for noting that! I don’t get any credit this time, since we have Peter as a guest writer this week - so between us, we got the whole week set ahead of time with very little effort on my side. But I’m definitely savoring the feeling of being on top of things for once! 😄

Yes! They’re extremely comfortable and well-fed. 🙂

When Peter pitched this week’s story, I asked, “Does it have to be giant spiders? What about giant silkworms, those would be slightly less creepy,” but he pointed out normally silk worms are killed to harvest their silk, and obviously we can’t have that! So giant spiders it is.

Nice, thanks for playing! I like the idea of easing into one a day. 😄

That’s so awesome you feel inspired! Please do feel free to share - you can just make a new post here on the community board for it.

Post your results and discuss the events of week 16, Feb 23 - Mar 1, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine.

Glad to hear it, thank you for letting me know!

Thank you for the excitement! I try to avoid commenting on speculation, but I feel like I should let you down early - I do not have time to be making a whole conlang so it’ll just be a few words here and there. 🙂

Nice, I was hoping people would enjoy discovering that! I added that Jan 28th after I saw the situation come up on Discord. 🙂