itch.io

…mentioned ‘Leoda’ as her home, and ‘Leodum’ is Ancient for ‘homeland’. I hypothesize that her language is descended from Ancient, just like Yliadan.

omg omg is that a conlang, do we get a Daily Spell conlang, so Ancient to ?Leoda-lang developed like -um > -a, is the -an in Yliadan the Yliadanic reflex of the same suffix? or is “Leodum” a transparent noun compound like “homeland”? will there be a whole family of Daily Spell languages, can we have a version of the puzzle entirely in the Yliadan language written in its constructed script naturally
(((* ॑꒳ ॑* ≡ * ॑꒳ ॑* )))ﾜｸﾜｸ

Congratulations on writing 100 wonderful little stories with puzzles to go with them! \o/ And thank you 🙏

Oh hard questions >.>

So the big one for me I think is, people I know are coming from a background of non-narrative daily puzzles with zero continuity, so they expect to jump into today’s puzzle, which doesn’t work well in this case. I appreciate that on a fresh browser you get shown a “solve this week’s puzzles” button that takes you to the beginning of the current storyline. But I think that still wasn’t enough for some to get the idea that they’re catching a story in the middle. Maybe because people will just click anything on a popup to make the popup go away, without paying much attention to what it says? Maybe there could be more visual cues about the unity of storyline, like some sort of weekday progress indicator for each week? Or dunno instead of “solve this week’s puzzles”, what if each week/story is called a “chapter” (or “episode”, or “scene”, “act”, etc.), and then you’d have instead, “Start from this week’s chapter”?

I imagine you’re trying to keep each week independent so that the backlog doesn’t feel intimidating for new players. It’s a tricky balance to have because I think The Daily Spell really shines going from the very start—I’ve really enjoyed the callbacks to previous storylines as I binged thru the whole thing, and the foreshadowing to upcoming ones. I guess calling it “Chapter 1” or “Episode 1” would nudge the balance towards asking the players to start from the beginning, which could feel intimidating as the game ages and grows ever bigger. On the other hand, if people want a hop-in daily puzzle with no context, they have plenty of options; having an ongoing telenovela to follow is exactly what makes this one special. On your favour, your game is highly addictive, so if you can get them to play the first few puzzles they’ll be hooked anyway and this question becomes moot :)

I’m not sure also about how to balance the tutorial—too long and the tutorial itself feels intimidating, but it’s true that the drop letter format itself seems to give people a blank page effect like, “dang how do I even start here”. If you’re reworking the first couple weeks anyway, and you’ll nudge players to try to start from week #1, maybe the ideal thing to do would be to make week #1 subtly the tutorial week, with a lower difficulty level than the rest of the game. Day #1 would be borderline trivial to solve, then each day introduces a bit more of ambiguity that benefits from some particular strategy. (I’m thinking of stuff like Super Mario 1-1, which teaches you the fundamentals of the game, without you even realising that you’re playing a tutorial level.) I don’t know how hard it is to pull that off, though.

I’m coming from the opposite direction in this: I was hoping to find some cool games like The Daily Spell (i.e. daily word puzzles with compelling narratives) to practice languages that I can read but not as well as English. I feel like the addictive nature of the cliffhangers would be valuable for language learners!

Wrote this to help a couple friends, so I figured I’d post it here in case anyone wants to copy it to their friends also.

What’s the buzz about this Daily Spell thing

It’s a daily word game like Wordle or Connections etc., but with a plot. You unscramble the headlines of a newspaper in a fantasy world, and get rewarded with a couple paragraphs of story within an ongoing continuity.

It feels a bit like doing the daily Wordle and reading the news and catching up on your fantasy series, all at once. The setting is cute and comfy and the writing, engaging.

I tried it once but I was frustrated and found it hard to get into

• First do the tutorial in the “how to play” button.
• Then I recommend starting from the Archive. Don’t start from today’s headline; you don’t want to miss the fun of all the cliffhangers and plot twists and continuity callbacks in the story.
• Look for very common, short function words. The top 10 frequent words in English are: “the”, “be”, “to”, “of”, “and”, “a”, “in”, “that”, “have”, “I”. The most common word, “the”, is particularly useful. Sure, sometimes the possibilities allow for “toe” or “bin” or something but if there’s a 3-letter word where the letters allow for “the”, then, statistically speaking, you’ll be right most of the time by going with “the”. This isn’t Wordle; get used to making tentative guesses and remaking them later if needed. There’s no penalty for wrong guesses.
• Look at the size of words as in a crossword puzzle, and then at the possibilities for the first letter. Use your knowledge of headline language, of the plot, and your linguistic intuition to guess what type of word would make sense here.
• Often a word pops intuitively in your mind, just from being involved with the plot. You can start typing it in a burst of enthusiasm, without checking letter-by-letter; if you’re wrong and that word can’t be spelled, the game will stop you halfway.
• Look also for which letters go together, like, ‘pl’ or ‘ph’ are fairly frequent in English, ‘pz’ or ‘pj’ are rare.
• If you’re stuck, try re-reading previous days of the current storyline and taking note of plot-relevant keywords (“mundane”, “scribe”, “arcanist” etc.) and proper nouns (“Lady Larissa”, “Garnet College” etc.). Look for the initial letter of those chunky big words and see if any fits. It’s very easy to browse back and forth between previous days, and the headline you’re currently solving; your progress won’t be lost.
• But don’t obsess with keeping track of all the character names, either. Most words are common words, not fantasy lingo. Celia makes fair puzzles; there’s generally entry points with the small function words, and she’s not trying to trip you up.
• Always read the “Brilliant puzzler unscrambles headline” copy to get that sweet hit of achievement.
• There’s a newsletter link at the bottom! It’s a fun newsletter!
• And a community forum on https://jamwitch.itch.io/the-daily-spell .
• Be warned that it will get addictive fast.

Realising I never left a comment on this game.

To my knowledge, these are all the classic games you can play as a sukeban or girl yankii character:

• Sukeban Deka II (Master System, 1987) (but she’s a cop)
• Sukeban Deka III (Famicom, 1988) (but she’s a cop)
• Kunio-tachi no Banka (SFC, 1994) (for part of the game)

…and that’s it. Right in the middle of the delinquent boom, there’s this big gap on console libraries that is perhaps less mysterious when you remember how rare it was to have female protagonists in the first place.

In my country I played on all three of these consoles, and we got access to Japanese games generally, but life never brought any of those titles to child me.

I still remember the first time I saw a sukeban-coded girl, some background or one-off side character in 80s tokusatsu; a schoolgirl carrying a while shinai dashing on a staircase, maybe in Changeman or Maskman or Sharivan or something. I never found her again, but the image of the sailor uniform girl with a bamboo sword on her shoulder was burned into my brain forever. (She’s probably the reason I got into kendō, subconsciously.) But I could only be a sukeban in River City Girls (2019), which I immediately found to be unplayable because both protagonists only, talk, about, their, boyfriends, all, the, time. They read like women write by men, in the worst sense. Finally, in RCG2 (2022), after literally three decades of waiting, I can be a delinquent schoolgirl and beat up people all day.

Which is to say, “Sukeban: Delinquent Detective” for Windows, macOS, and Linux plugs precisely into a gap that my childhood left in my heart. It’s a game that I should have played on my Phantom System in 1991 and obsessed about while not understanding anything and then I’d have written ten-pages nostalgic essays on insert credit dot com when I rediscovered it 15 years later. I’ve played this multiple times and it’s perfect. Thank you.

(I wish there was a Japanese “original” too, but I don’t trust my Japanese enough to write it myself. I’m still glad I got to play the “translation”.)

The news:

Condom shortage hits Winter Olympics as supplies vanish in just 3 days

picture me looking for a button to find the next headline which I expected to be

Arcane Surge in Italy May be Responsible for Mysterious Disappearance of Condoms, Claims Topaz Club

or like

Detective Stone Refutes Accusation of Mundane Club’s Energy Accumulator Provoking Olympic Condom Mishap

The Condom Mystery is Intriguing but Please Focus on Your Studies, Urges Dean

Vanishing Condoms Linked to Garnett College’s Arcanic Prank Gone Wrong

congratulations, your game has ruined (improved) news headlines for me

Anna I can hardly believe it’s been 17 years since you invented masocore, and it increases my admiration of you that you’re here in 2025 writing formally perfect replies to that type of comment

長文感謝してますよ m(__)m

I’ve been thinking a lot about that too. Thanks for making stories about it.

Well joke’s on us, my little brown mushroom ended up dating the scholar girl. So if you ever feel like a loser, incompetent etc. remember, you too can end up with a cute nerdy lesbian gf with a mysterious secret, all you need is kindness and a bit of luck~

is there any way to recover from doomed 🤔

its ok

finally

Nyaa-lar-thot-ep

Warning: It’s a straight game!! Yes I was also confused. The protagonist looks like that but remains straight the whole game. Amazing, I know.

Despite the straightness it’s a great game! There’s a lot of playtime, writing and art in this package and the price is very fair for what you get! If you like both point-and-click and beat’em up the game is a treat.

If you don’t like robot slurs be prepared to endure a lot of them because the protagonist very often uses derisive terms for robots right to their faces and he never really stops doing it.

incidentally if the first glitch is unintentional I think it should stay, it’s harmless and adds to the atmosphere!

I hit on two oddities that I don’t know whether they’re intentional creepy stuff or unintentional glitches, so I’m writing them here:

• at the train station, if you read the sign before talking to the people, their dialogue glitches until you leave the room.

• if after the events where your cousin is attacked, after he wakes up and leaves the house, you go back to the train station, you find him at the station again just like when he first arrived. the plot and dialogue then repeats until the point where you’re asked to wear the party suit, but the suit-changing cutscene doesn’t trigger, and I couldn’t proceed the plot at this point.

I love the pixel art and the music in this, thank you for the game!

I put all points exclusively on strenght, gave my pidgeon only protein, and picked out only the enemies with the weakest defense. She one-shotted everything and eventually grew muscle arms. Then another muscle arms pidgeon came who had half as much strenght but a couple points in defense and speed, and killer her

if you ever wanted to waste to laudanum while denying your past with a copy of Proust on your bedside table, have an argument with your male gay lover in early 20th century Rome, or melancholichaly strum the Gymnopédies on your harp then wonder when did your harp get covered by a cloth and where is the maid and no, shh, don’t disturb the shadows, all in tasteful point-and-click pixel art, have I got the game to suggest you

I liked this simulation because it reminded me that I must imagine Sysiphus happy. I am reacting to content

edit: the content crashed while I wrote my reaction. I guess I have to reload the web page and do it all over again

Wine still can’t run it on Linux :/

This was a cool picross game! I love the characters and I was delighted to discover the secret one behind the truck.

My friendly suggestions for improvements if ever wanted would be:

• An ending sequence with all characters in the spaceship or a planet would be fantastic!
• The powerups get a bit repetitive; all of them are either extra hearts, or revealing tiles. I think many quality-of-life features of modern picross games could be made into powerups for more diversity. For example, marking each individual number as completed as you work on a line, a brush with temporary markers for planning, or an invincible mode that doesn’t punish you for mistakes (at the cost of not informing you whether the marked tile is correct or not either, until you solve the entire puzzle).

This game taught a silly gay bimbo like me how to picross in a fun and cute way. Two weeks later and I’m still staying up late finishing every level of Mario no Sūpā Pikurosu. Beware!

Tem como comprar o jogo final pra Linux nalguma plataforma que não seja o Steam? Itch seria ótimo mas aceito literalmente qualquer coisa exceto Steam

Is the Linux build available on Itch?

My partner wanted to play a game with frogs. When I wasn’t even looking this one popped up and we could play this game and it had frogs in it, both full-time and part-time frog fulfillment fantasy. A+ would frog again

This is a cool game, thank you for making it!

I’m not a bullet hell player. The normal mode is too hard for me, but the easy mode was interesting and challenging. However, by the time I got to the rematch mode, I had unlocked enough RPG skills to one-shot all bosses before they were able to even move. While I appreciate a breezy challenge, I feel like if I can unlock the “perfect match” without even dodging anything a single turn, it became too easy. It made the endgame an exercise in collecting the remaining uprades without any challenge.

Also, during the final battle, I can’t seem to transform in Linux? A legend says, “hold Ctrl to transform”, but holding Control does nothing. This makes the Queen’s attacks impossible to dodge.

Dear Hthr, I have come here from the times of the future! And I too have the problem above with the Linux version!

Keyboard is responsive to enter the ESC menu, but nothing I do moves the wizard! Tell me if there’s anything I can do to help debug this ok! You rock!!

I love love love the art in this, the palette, the dithers the animations everything!!

p.s. protagonist: please move the kitchen houseplant to the window sill, she’s too far away, it’s too dark, plants need sun

Very enjoyable rhythm game! I recommend it.

My suggestion for improvement would be different shapes for the enemy types, with clearly distinct sillhouettes, rather than relying on headband colours only.

genius

asking the real questions

Nice

She loved it! This was the label btw, based on https://zipon.itch.io/gameboy-label-for-gb-studio-games

got a gbc flashcart, put this on it, going to print a label and gift it to my ex who’s a plantgirl, we’re going to buy plants together tomorrow<3

I want to make a zine abt queer love really hoping for a linux version <3

thank you 🙇‍♀️

Thank you so much for this, I know someone who will benefit a lot from it it’s a great gift ^^

Update: everything working great https://files.transmom.love/video/valhalla02.webm