Yeah I appreciate that. We're thinking now of perhaps adding a post-game mode that allows people to practise parts of the puzzles so they can sharpen up their skills whilst saving the larger puzzles for the main daily event.
>A spoiler for the some-owner puzzle: "one" is a homophone of "won", apparently, but I can't see how they're pronounced the same.
Yeah it's unfortunate because I'm British, "one" and "won" are said the same for us but I didn't notice that they would be different for Americans. I should exclude puzzles where these differences happen, I just didn't spot this one. I'll have to test each puzzle with my best american accent on going forward.
>In the examples we have "thyme → time", but doesn't "thyme" have the "th" sound while "time" has the "t" sound?
In the UK we pronounce this like "time". Is that not the case in the US?
>Finally, "One new puzzle each day" - why do people do this? There's no way to play more than 1 puzzle, but by tomorrow I will have probably lost interest.
I need time to find the right puzzles and as you can see it can be pretty tricky to find ones that don't have regional pronunciation deviations, are fun to solve and are easy enough for a broad majority. I could add archive playing but frankly I do like the idea of a daily puzzle, even if some others don't like that. I think for as many people who don't like it there are people who do.
>Will you / could you add access to past puzzles? That's the first thing I looked for but couldn't find.
Yeah I'm still torn about this. On the one hand, it's obviously a really easy feature to add and allows users who want to play more to do so. And I'm aware that a lot of people really don't like it when daily puzzle games don't let you play through the archive. On the other hand, I am quite romantic about the daily thing. I really loved the fact you could only play Wordle once a day, there was something special about it in an era of unlimited, endless content. I know it's no longer novel to limit players to just one puzzle a day, but something is compelling me to keep it that way.
Yeah I think these are all really fair criticisms and I agree with them all.
Regarding the steakhouse/stakeholder issue, I think that because these words lean American they got missed in the compound word generation stage. Will add them now. Can totally see how that created a lot of confusion for you when trying to solve yesterday’s puzzle.
And yeah I've been finding differentiating between correctness and validity a really hard design challenge because I don’t want to reveal to the player that they are on the solution path since the ambiguity/branching is often what makes it challenging. I think there needs to be a clearer signal that whilst your answer might be accepted, it's not necessarily the correct solution.
Steak/stake is both an anagram and a compound and I still haven’t solved how we handle these edge cases. I shouldn’t really have released this particular puzzle given it starts with this issue. I just didn’t even notice till it was too late!
Thanks for playing and for the super valuable feedback!
Yeah it can be really tough. The tricky thing is finding a puzzle that a good majority of people (50-70%) can solve without hints. It's also super unpredictable to determine what people will find tricky. I thought today's puzzle was relatively straight forward, it's EYE -> TIRED. But now I'm realising that EYE has so many compound words which mean N blind alleys to explore before you land on the correct path.
And yes, TwixT does look like a really novel game! I've never really seen a peg board style board game before. I'll try find an old copy on eBay and give it a go.