itch.io

Thank you so much for this lovely comment!! My heart grew three sizes reading that. As a writer, it means so much to know that I was able to communicate something about the characters and that people appreciate them. 💜

Absolute chef’s kiss! This made my day, thank you!

Thanks for grabbing that, I appreciate it!

I think that the timer started for the Jan 28th puzzle when you started playing the game (guessing based on these numbers that was Wed Jan 28 2026 01:43:53 GMT-0500.) When you started playing, you probably went to How to Play and then Solve from the Beginning? Something didn’t pause the 28th’s timer correctly so it still had that start time when you eventually solved it. (I don’t know why the startTime then got a new value after the endTime…)

This gives me a lot to go on to repro, thank you! Will try to get this fixed.

Oh man, I was hoping there weren’t any timer bugs, but I kind of figured some might be lurking. 😢

If you remember, did it say that yesterday as soon as you finished the puzzle, or was it correct before and it changed today? Or did you just now solve yesterday’s?

Two completely optional things you could do:

1. If you remember, give me a rundown of what actions you took when solving the puzzle: did you have the tab already open, if so did you refresh, or did you open it new? While you were solving, did you switch to another day or open How to Play or About the Game? Did you switch browser tabs in the middle?
2. If you’re up for it, grab your game stats from local storage and send them to me for inspection. We could chat on discord - my username is the same as it is here.

Here’s a hint on where to look:

Thanks, glad you enjoyed the game! I've never seen... *googles* Passengers, but it does sound like an interesting scenario to me.

Thank you, that's really nice to hear!

Oh that's really nice to hear, thanks!

Yes, you're right, the gold is random. My goal was just to give a little fun surprise while playing and to have a bonus if you clear more of the level, not to make it super optimizable. Thanks for checking it out and sharing your feedback!

Post your results and discuss the events of week 12, Jan 26-Feb 1, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine.

Yay, thank you so much! I enjoyed seeing your thoughts and happy you liked the game!

I loved this comment. High praise! 😂

Thank you! I appreciate hearing your thoughts. That makes sense, and I do really enjoy making small games so I expect I’ll stick with that. 🙂

Just to share, here's a couple updates from this weekend:

1. Timer pausing
   1. The pause timer now pauses if you switch to a different day, open a pop-up like About or How to Play, or minimize the browser tab.
      
   2. Also, for consistency, the timer now starts as soon as the puzzle is fully revealed (previously it was only when the first letter was moved.)
   3. If you see anything unexpected in your final solve time please let me know!
2. Puzzle date in the url (this applies to the-daily-spell.com and does not affect itch)
   1. Adding ?d={date} to the url acts as a permalink to that puzzle. You can see it when viewing previous day's puzzles.
   2. This also means if you're viewing a previous day's puzzle and refresh the page, you'll stay there.
   3. Navigate to the plain URL or click "Today" to go back to the default view that always shows the latest puzzle.
3. Style tweak for buttons. Let me know what you think.
4. Fixed the next day's headline and article being revealed if you use the date navigation in the middle of the completion animation. Now it should cancel the animation and just show the next day's puzzle.

I'm working on a few more things, large and small. Thanks for playing and let me know if you have any feedback or run into any issues!

Post your results and discuss the events of week 11, Jan 19-25, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine.

Thank you so much for the support!!

Good catch, thanks!

Thanks for asking! My ideal schedule is to make all the week's puzzles at once, and have one or two ideas for future weeks planned in advance. The reality is while I usually have a rough outline for the week, I've been ending up writing the puzzles/articles at the last minute. I'm a major procrastinator, especially when I care about something, so just the fact that I've kept the game updated for 10 weeks is something I'm proud of, even if it's sometimes a last-minute scramble! But I do want to do better, for my own time management and to make sure I give you all the best stories I can.

Since you asked, I'll let you in on a secret: just for fun and as an accountability nudge, I added a little wand icon to the bottom of the archive page that only appears when the current week is entirely uploaded and ready to go. We haven't seen much of it lately, but my goal is to change that! Please keep an eye out for that and I'll keep doing my best to stay on top of everything. 🙂

Very randomly, by mixing the names of old coworkers, names from baby name websites, or names I jot down from other places. 🤷‍♀️ My goal, not always achieved, would be for them to sound slightly unusual, sophisticated, and like they fit in a fantasy world, and not be distracting in some way (like accidentally being a celebrity...)

If the person's name will appear in a puzzle, especially if that's before it appears in an article (something I'm moving away from now), I try to use a word surname or a very recognizable name so it's more solvable. I don't usually pick names based on symbolic meaning, because that feels too gimmicky - like I wouldn't name a gardener Florian. (There is one matching pair of names for two connected characters, which could be seen as a gimmick, though. 🕵️‍♂️)

I really underestimated how many names I'd have to come up for this project, thanks to the newspaper format, so it's been a work in progress! Thanks for the interest. 🙂

That makes me happy to hear, thank you for following along! 🙂

Super useful details, thank you! I found it. (Infinite loop when using the arrow keys but there's no other square to move to.) It should be fixed now, thanks again for the report.

Hmm, this is a new one, I definitely want to fix that. Are you on mobile? Click/tap to pick letters, or keyboard? Did you do anything other than enter letters, like open the How to Play pop-up in the midst of solving?

Post your results and discuss the events of week 10, Jan 12-18, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine.

Indeed, I couldn't resist!

Not my pancakes!!

Yeah, thanks for the idea, and this isn’t the first time someone mentioned that. I’ll come up with a more aesthetic solution later, but for now I just added a confirmation popup to the reset button.

Oh man, thanks for pointing that out, that would be your garden variety mistake on my part. Fixed!

I want the game to flow well on mobile, so I added a lot of features like automatic selection and scrolling… but I got some great feedback that those can also get in the way, so I just made some changes. Please let me know what you think or if you have any other pet peeves.

(Keyboard entry hasn’t changed and is a lot simpler - the selection always advances to the next square - because it’s easy to move the selection with the arrow keys, so this is aimed at mobile players, especially if you play in portrait orientation.)

1. Selection is no longer automatically advanced to a new row, unless it’s the same word.
   • After picking a letter, if the next space is empty, selection moves there, but now that does not apply if you’re at the end of the row and at the end of a word. This is so you can continue working on that side of the grid.
2. When selection is auto-advanced after picking a letter, that no longer scrolls the whole word into view.
   • It will scroll slightly to get the selected square into view if necessary, but will otherwise leave you where you were.
   • If you tap a square to select it, that still does scroll the whole word into view - so just tap the next word if you want to focus on it.
3. Skip over already-filled letters in the same word when auto-advancing.
   • If the next spot is already filled, but there are empty spaces later in the word, move selection there.
   • Also, if the end of the word is now filled, but the beginning has empty spaces, move selection to the beginning. I’m not sure about this one, so let me know.
4. Adjusted swap logic so clicking an empty square doesn’t move the currently selected letter.
5. Fixed the scroll word into view logic for words that are too wide for the screen. ​

The logic is a bit complex, but my goal is the net effect is it should feel intuitive and save you some taps. Let me know what you think as you try it out! (If you have a specific situation to comment on, if can take a screenshot and note exactly what order you did things in, that would be amazing.)

This comment made me laugh but also cry because it's so hard to come up with names. 😂

Looks like Craig Danielsen was just a transcription error from a The Daily Spell intern, and his name has now been corrected to the hopefully less distracting Gregory Danielsen. ✨ (There may still be a Brosnan out there though. 😄)

Ahh this is fixed now. Everything was ready (and the-daily-spell.com was successfully updated), but I had failed to hit the button to publish Tuesday's puzzle to itch.io. 🤦‍♀️ Thank you so much for letting me know, it's a huge help!

Post your results and discuss the events of week 9, Jan 5-11, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine.

Wow, playing as a non-native speaker does sound tricky, so I'm really glad you're enjoying it! The headline syntax is a bit of a mix between the concise style you'd see in a real headline and normal sentence structure, so hopefully you're not finding it too awkward. :)

Thanks! So this would be something to use while you're mid-solve to confirm if you're on the right track? That's useful to hear that would be helpful. I'm thinking of eventually adding some more validate/hint options in a menu so will keep this one in mind! 

Thanks so much for the heads up, fixed!

Okay, this made me laugh. I did change the wording so it's not too distracting, but please imagine whatever pajama hijinks would be most entertaining. 😄

I found it so hard to narrow down what could go where, but the discoveries were totally worth persevering! What a cleverly constructed game.

Thank you! 😊 Glad you're enjoying it!

Post your results and discuss the events of week 8, Dec 29-Jan 4, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine.

Oops, I keep being late to start the weekly thread, sorry! I blame the holidays.

Afraid not, I just had to google that! Glad you enjoyed.