itch.io

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. 🙂

Oh my gosh! I never thought I’d see a Dungeon Descent speedrun. I love that you wanted to explore the game this way!

Seeing this, I think I maybe should have made collecting people’s portraits a requirement for solving their fates, but I’ll leave this optimization route intact. 😄

Thanks for this!

I couldn’t reproduce the problem without zooming way out - do you have the page zoomed? Or do you have a giant monitor by any chance?

I did go ahead and fully hide the puzzle area after sliding it down. I think that should take care of it overlapping - let me know how it looks now.

Ah, thank you for reporting! I’ll take a look. The amount of overlap is just how long the newspaper content is (long today because of the announcement), but I need to fix so it’s not showing at all.

Thank you so much for this thoughtful response! It’s given me a lot to ponder and I really want to try to make some of these adjustments.

I actually call the weeks “chapters” in the code, maybe you’re right that that would be more clear to just show it that way! Thanks! I actually really like the idea of the weekday progress indicator too, let me think about that one…

What you’re saying about the backlog potentially being intimidating vs the experience being better if you get the whole story is something I’ve thought about a lot! I’m totally fine with people who just start playing for a week, get into the puzzles and story, and then decide if they want to go through the backlog. So I hope the way I’m presenting it now with both options works well.

I like what you’re saying about having a tutorial week that’s a real week of puzzles. Some people don’t read the How to Play and just want to dive in, but if I can get them to dive into a tutorial, that would be good. 🙂 I’m now starting to think I should make a Week/Chapter 0 - although it may be fewer than 7 days - that people can start with that will lead to the current Week 1.

I’ll keep thinking and hopefully working on this. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts!

I was wondering if anyone would think of that! I didn’t want it to be a super glaring reference (the princes are not particularly musical or anything), but that is the road I went down when trying to come up with their names. 🙂

Shows me for trying to work ahead for next week, haha. Thanks for reporting!

I’ve removed the puzzles for next week, can you refresh and see if you still see the 23rd puzzle? You shouldn’t be able to see anything later than Feb 16th.

It’s a name someone submitted to the name suggestion form (which you get by signing up for the newsletter)! At first I wasn’t going to use it because it was so out there, but it seemed perfect for today’s otherwise straightforward article.

Post your results and discuss the events of week 15, Feb 16-22, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine.

Nice, thank you so much for writing this!

As the dev I’m curious to hear, from your experience or that of friends you’ve introduced it to, can you think of anything that I can change to make it easier to get into? For example, a fuller tutorial experience that takes you through step by step? One thing I have on my mind is the first couple weeks are the least consistent - there are a lot more tricky things like names popping up unexpectedly - so I might revise them to align with how I would do things now. I wonder if that would help if the first couple weeks eased people in a little more?

I’m planning to make a bigger post later (and mention it in the newsletter - sign up for the newsletter!) but thought I’d drop a line about some new UI updates.

I added some screenshots below, but they may have spoilers if you’re not caught up, so read on at your own risk.

1. On the archive page, there’s a new nav bar where you can jump directly to a week by number. Hopefully this gives a little bit of structure as the archive gets longer.

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2. I also added a search bar! Type words to find all (solved, of course) puzzles/articles that include that exact string. I hope people get a lot of use out of this if you need to refresh your memory about a particular character or term.

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By the time the newsletter comes out (noon EST), I’ll also have bonus puzzles showing on the archive list, but only once you unlock them via the link in the newsletter.

I’ve been meaning to update the archive page for a while, so I’m eager to hear if it’s useful. If you find any bugs or quibbles, bring them on!

Also, a couple puzzle UI changes. These were both suggested by players - thank you!

1. You can now swap letters while they’re in the trays by clicking one after the other. You could use this to plan a word even if you don’t know exactly what grid row it goes in.
2. If you have a letter in the grid selected, now you can click the empty part of the tray above in order to put it back.

Thanks everyone for playing and giving such great feedback and ideas!

Yay, I’m glad to hear that!

I can say there is not such a bonus. I don’t want to add something like that since I don’t want to imply it’s better to stare at it first and then enter everything in one go, because at least for me, it’s a more fun solve to try things out as I go and work it out.

Oh no 😂 This gave me a laugh, thank you!

It is a deliberate choice to make the puzzle flow better by having more small connecting words that you can quickly fill in as a starting point, and ideally more sentence-y syntax you can lean on to work out the structure rather than undifferentiated noun-pile headline.

I’m surprised you think it’s more difficult as a sentence than a headline, can you explain more?

I agree it’s not ideal as a headline, and yes, my excuse is they have a different style guide in Yliad, haha.

Wow, that’s great to hear! Supporting local newspapers is a great thing so I’m happy the game made you think about that. Thank you for playing and for the kind words!

Yes, sure! If you’re willing to provide a translation for free I am happy to add it. Want to discuss more on discord? I’m celia14.

I hadn’t thought of that before but I don’t see why not! Good idea, adding it to the to-do list.

Thanks for the input! It’s definitely a tricky one since I’ve heard that auto scrolling is convenient, so I don’t want to get rid of it, but adding more complex logic around it could make it seem more unexpected. It helps to hear people’s feedback, thanks.

One thing for this particular case is you could tap the T first, then the spot to put it in, since picking the letter first doesn’t activate the auto scroll. Do you think that would work as a solution to this type of situation?

And the Drop Single Letters button is also there, I hope people make good use of that since I find it pretty convenient when solving.

I was happy to see these videos of people playing The Daily Spell! It’s really fun for me to see people’s solving process, and I’m grateful for the help spreading the word.

Ambie Puzzles:

Stumped:

If there’s anyone else out there sharing The Daily Spell, definitely let me know! 🙂

No it is not, thank you for pointing that out. 😅

Trying a different build process and it didn’t pick up my (admittedly last minute) change to set the title. Now I know! Thanks.

Post your results and discuss the events of week 14, Feb 9-15, here. Spoilers for this and past weeks are fine.

Well, you see, it’s a society that highly values the written word…

The actual answer is it would be amazing to have images, but this is a free game without a budget for art, so it’s not likely in the near future at least.

Just wondering, what makes you want to stay on itch.io vs playing on the-daily-spell.com?

Aha, that helps a bunch, thanks!

So: Completion stats are stored in your browser’s localStorage, and it looks like you’ve hit a limit to how much data can be stored. This is not expected on its own since the localStorage limit per domain is 5 MB and each day’s stats are pretty small. You could have thousands of days of stats and be fine.

But, I see you’re playing on itch, and on itch, all embedded games’ localStorage records are stored together. So if there are other games that have also saved data to localStorage, they’re taking up TDS’s precious storage space!!

Action from your side:

1. My top recommendation is to play on our dedicated site, the-daily-spell.com. The game will always remain available on itch, but I generally recommend players use the site to avoid some complications like this one.
   • (Your completion stats will not copy over, so you can just use the Unlock All Past Puzzles buttons to reveal past articles - unless you want to looking into copying and pasting the-daily-spell-stats record from one localStorage to another.)
2. Or, if you want to stay on itch, you can try deleting records from localStorage for games you don’t care about to make room (at your own risk 🙂).

What I’ll do: Because under normal circumstances it will be hard to run out of room, I’m not going to do something like start dropping old days’ stats to make room for incoming days, that’s too complex. But I will catch the error so it doesn’t break the whole completion flow like it is now, and show a alert so the next time someone runs into this it’s at least clear what the problem is.

Thanks for stress testing this part of the game! 🫡

Uh oh. I did make a fix recently for the issue where if you navigate to the next puzzle too quickly, it was accidentally revealing that puzzle’s headline (as the original puzzle’s animation completed.) I wonder if that is overzealously blocking completion even on the original puzzle? But I can’t reproduce the problem myself…

1. What browser are you using? What input are you using, especially to fill in the final letter - keyboard? Clicking/tapping the letter? The Drop single letters button? Any other actions taken after filling the last letter?
2. Can you repro it if you click Replay and fill in the answer again, or only the first time you solve a puzzle? (Try incognito mode if you want to solve a puzzle anew to compare.)
3. If you open the dev tools console, any red error messages?

This is pretty mysterious and I want to get to the bottom of it, so thanks for any extra info you have!