itch.io

Oh I forgot to mention -- because I think 12 Word Searches is best played digitally (too much erasing), I categorized it as a "Game" instead of "Physical Game" [edit: or "Book"]. If you do the latter, I imagine more than 25% of downloads will be the print version. If having two versions is too much of a pain, doing the printable version only is probably fine, it'll just be harder to see the whole page at once on computers. Also, I think I initially just had the landscape version during testing, and didn't make the printable version until I was ready to release the game. 

Awesome, it's always great to hear that I've inspired folks. I'm not a marketing guy or game publishing expert so I'm not sure how helpful I'll be, but here's what I can think of:

For making your game findable, use everything itch recommends -- thumbnail, screenshots, and tags. There's only a few dozen itch games tagged word-search so you might get a handful of players just by being on that list. Personally, I got initial traction for my book by sharing it in a puzzle-game discord where I was an existing user (mainly lurking and play-testing other people's games). Note that most places will either have rules against self-promotion or will be filled with spam, so you should mainly share via communities you have a connection to. Feel free to share it here on this thread when you're done.

Regarding landscape & portrait mode: 75% of downloads have been for the landscape version, which I imagine most folks want to play right in Chrome or Firefox's built-in annotators. But a printable version is nice to have too, as printable puzzle books are fairly rare on itch but there's a good-sized niche of folks interesting in them. Ideally, the printable version should be playable in black&white for folks like me who don't have a color printer at home.

In terms of game-design: If you're an amateur designer, err on the side of easier difficulty. An overly easy puzzle book can be a fun way to spend half an hour, but an overly hard one is frustrating and most people will quit. You can hedge your bets by putting hints in the back. And if your answers aren't as self-checking as 12 Word Searches, you'll want answers in the back too. And since some people find Rule Discovery frustrating, you might want a third section in the back that explains any unexplained rules. Check out Lok as a good example of this: https://letibus.itch.io/lok. In many cases, it is good to have a bunch of easy tutorial puzzles in your book in order to reinforce the mechanics in the player's mind and make rule-discovery more fair. (Don't make the player read your mind.) One way to design a hard-but-fair puzzles is to make it solvable in multiple ways -- for instance, in 12 Word Searches, you sometimes have a choice between searching the grid for plausible words or deciphering the clues and using those to determine what word you're searching for.

I will consider making it a bit easier, perhaps reducing how many copies of 37 they have. That said: if you find the right deck you should have no trouble.

What difficulty level are you on, Casual or Challenge?

Thanks! The 0 in puzzle 4 is because there's no famous US [redacted]s in August... but perhaps I should've just included a January one. Fair point about the bad grammar, I couldn't think of a good use for "aa" within the message.

Thanks! "Category"  wasn't meant to be difficult once you know the idea. Since other people have mentioned that too, I'll plan on refactoring 11 to use "Theme". I'm also hoping to eventually add a picture hint for puzzle 1 but I need to figure out how to implement it.

Thanks! You can send it to hoffman.jeremy##@gmail.com   where ## is the card that burns a tile and also removes all burn and freeze from the board.

FWIW when testing Efficient I finished Hard in 17 or 18 matches in just one try... though that was a few years ago. Tip: If you can solve battle 5 right off the bat, it should be reasonable. (But not easy!) Note that puzzle battles do not count toward your total.

Good point about the explosion, I'll see about adding some more visual effects, maybe some dust or something.

Intended. You can exit this screen using the Esc key.

The first 2 are intended behavior (INPUT_1.0 canonically has a single-digit display), the third I will plan on fixing next update. (Need to add new variable to save files.)

Oops, just realized I never replied. I added it as a cheat code: Toggle no-drag mode with Shift+D.

Mostly because the effects periodically got swapped around during development. It also helps to distinguish factors from mathematical constants, particular when I want to Ctrl+F for everything related to a certain factor (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_number_(programming)).

Yes, I wanted to reuse Factor Crafter's core concept and art to make something with more gameplay to it. I knew I wanted each n-stone to cost n currency and have all abilities of its factors. I originally considered Tower Defense, but it was hard for composites to be worth their cost. To make something like 11x5 be worth spending 55 currency on, I needed players to have limited stones per turn. This lead me to use cards. (Also I play a lot of card games.)

Sounds like you just made a small error somewhere, they should be a perfect match.

Thanks! Glad to see Relectric Roogaloo got into v2, that was exclusive to the extras from that Humble Bundle right?

Also, I really like the little trick for solving the Pokedex puzzle more easily -- I only spotted two my first time through, then realized how to find the rest.

Sorry, the old Unity files keep auto-updating and have become too much of a mess, I probably won't be making any changes to the game unless I do a big overhaul eventually.

Oh no, sorry about that! I guess the save system I used wasn't very robust. I'll see about adding a cheat code soon to skip ahead in endless (probably 25 at a time).

Oh neat, thanks! My email is [redacted]

Oh my gosh, thank you! I remember getting Puzzlecraft probably a decade ago now, and getting inspired to make some riddles for my (rather mediocre) 10 Puzzles project. Oh, and coincidentally I just ordered Betrayal a couple days ago -- didn't know you were involved with that until I googled it. Excited to play it this Halloween with my family.

Thanks! I was wondering where all the new folks came from.

Puzzle 5 can be solved logically, though finding the right steps is a bit tricky (and arbitrary).

Hmmm. The most similar game I can think of is LOCK for PS Dreams. (Although I haven't played it myself, I just watched Keith Ballard's play-through.)

I don't play a lot of word games or puzzle hunts, so everything else that comes to mind is just normal puzzle games with good epiphanies -- Linelith, Öoo, Slicecraft, Pâquerette, Bee Magic, N-Step Steve, Insight, A Monster's Expedition, etc.

In terms of books, ABDEC might be the most similar to 12 WS (consistent rules, fleshed out over time) but it is fiendishly difficult at one point. Oh, and the excel-based puzzle Rainbow Challenge / INTAO 🟥🟧🟨🟩🟦🟪⬛ seemed excellent, though I got stuck halfway through, and it's structured such that the rules change for every puzzle.

Yep the intent is to use the leftovers as a guide for the 12th word, but your way works fine too.

The box is just a little checkbox to mark off to affirm you've gotten the final message, in case you didn't get 144/144 in doing so, or got all 144 but missed the message due to not writing out the list.

All the info you need is right there in the final puzzle.

The question to ask is... Jung ner lbh gb qb jvgu gur yrsgbiref sebz cntr 12 orsber lbh fbyir?

Great! The vector graphic for TOMEDECART is in the same folder I shared before (12WS - shared).

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!

Thanks, I'll fix it eventually. In-universe, the larger stones are meant to be algorithmic, although in reality I've only done that with anti-stone.

Ah, okay. I may have fixed this already, I will check and fix if needed in the next update.

I've confirmed the AI does know when stones are immune.

Is the AI choosing to play next to 7-stone even when it could destroy one of your stones? If not, there's no issue -- the AI always prefers to play next to your stones, regardless of stone effects, to reduce your number of valid moves. Note that it also tries to avoid destroying it's own stones, so that may be a cause of confusing behavior.

Sorry for not responding, I couldn't figure out the key either. Please just use rot-13 or spoiler boxes. I will be fixing 65's sprite eventually.

The WebGL save file is stored under idbfs/Strategems and downloaded versions are stored in Application.persistentDataPath/Strategems.data. They are most-likely compatible, though I haven't tested it. (Google the location of Application.persistentDataPath on your device.)

You can also use the following cheat code: Hold E + Y when selecting New Game in order to start a save file that's about 2/3 complete (up to 79 and Lab 2).

That's odd, I didn't use Unity Analytics or any other features that might be flagged. Sorry about that, not sure what happened. Feel free to use the browser version if you prefer, they should be equivalent.

Sure, feel free. I would recommend Miraheze or other alternatives [edit: e.g. Wiki.gg] rather than Fandom(wikia), since the latter has an unusually large amount of ads and other annoying features.

Save data is saved in the path  "idbfs/Strategems". Maybe you have high-privacy browser settings set to wipe this data when closing your browser? Have other browser-based Unity games been saving fine for you?

(For me, using a Private Window in Firefox results in new save files which last for only that window, so it may be something similar to that.)

No problem at all! Just let people know that if they have bug reports and such, they should post that on here.

It's for winning any match in Casual, period.

This way, you cannot e.g. get the Efficient achievement in Casual and then go back and replay levels with 100 energy.

Sorry about that, it might not be compatible with your phone? It looks fine on my Galaxy A14 (Android 15, One UI 7.0).

Did the game show the correct assets at any point? Have you tried reinstalling? What Android version do you have?

Discovering 0-stone this way and getting whitescreened is intentional. However, exiting fullscreen shouldn't remove the flash, I will look into it. Thanks. (Note: Pressing Esc during this screen should return you to the menu.)

I changed the 100 deck to be tougher in a recent update. (I also made small changes to the game's AI, but it shouldn't affect 100 much.)

Whoa, that's super cool! Absolutely.

Good catch, I will add it to the next update. (Probably "two cards cost +169".)

Thanks, will fix tomorrow.

Already on it, I will be posting a fix for this shortly.