The Daily Spell is a daily puzzle with an ongoing story that I originally created for ThinkyCon Jam 2025. In this post, I’ll talk about what I learned from ThinkyCon and how The Daily Spell came to be.

🧡 Ideas going into the jam

I’m writing a whole separate devlog on some of the inspirations for The Daily Spell: the daily puzzles I’ve been loving this year, how Clues by Sam’s ongoing story arcs made me want to explore daily puzzle + story, and my discovery of the drop quote puzzle format. Will link it here once it’s posted!

Going into ThinkyCon Jam, I had drop quote puzzles in mind for a fun, satisfying word puzzle, but I was also considering making a narrative deduction mystery game like my past two jam games. Jamwitch’s other half, Rose, was too busy to join the jam, so I was in the mindset of looking for a text-based game idea I could make solo.

💛 ThinkyCon insights

The theme for the ThinkyCon Jam was to watch the puzzle game design-related talks from ThinkyCon and get inspired, which was really fun!

The talks were full of fascinating ideas about how to think about designing thinky games, but at first, it was tricky to think of ideas for what to build - I’m used to jams that give a concrete theme, which is always fun to brainstorm about. But in the end, my existing ideas, the how from the talks, and a couple whats from the talks nudged me toward something fun.

Here’s some of the interesting talks I watched:

CorgiSpace

I would highly recommend everyone watch Adam Saltsman’s talk on his approach to making small games, it was really interesting and inspirational! Here’s some of his points and how they apply to The Daily Spell:

1. Work “with the grain” of your brain to create things that are easy to make, but non-obvious.
   • As game jammers, I think Rose and I already have a lot of practice doing “easy” things, so I liked this part.
   • On the flip side, I do think there should be room to push yourself, and small games are the perfect place to do it. For The Daily Spell, being creative on an ongoing basis to write each week’s story is not easy for me at all, but I want to get better at it!
2. From the initial “glob” of an idea, iterate on the idea (the heart of the game) and the formula (the expression of the idea that players experience) separately to refine the game.
   • I was really fascinated by this idea, but I don’t think I’ve ever carried it out, since we normally make games for game jams and don’t have time (or, frankly, motivation) to drastically iterate the way Adam described. I do really want to keep this concept in mind, though (like if I ever make a larger version of My Friends the Monster Trainers…?)
3. NOTICE things about your game and design as a player.
   • Another idea that really captured my imagination! Watch the talk to hear the whole philosophy.
   • I do think this is tricky for authored puzzle games like The Daily Spell, since you can never truly experience it as a naive player. When working on The Daily Spell, I kept thinking that solving the puzzles was tedious and the whole game was doomed, because the magic of drop quotes disappears if you know the answer. I had to keep chanting to myself, “Drop quote puzzles are fun. You enjoy novel drop quote puzzles. Players will enjoy these puzzles.” 😆 I’m sure this is familiar to puzzle game designers, but not something I’ve been through to this degree!

Puzzle design through curriculum design

• I really enjoyed Gwen C. Katz’s talk on learning, especially the idea of the Explore phase, where you motivate players to just get acquainted with the information via a straightforward task, like collecting all the words in Golden Idol-like games, before the more demanding deduction parts.
• For The Daily Spell, this would be like if there was some additional task after you read the article, to help you learn that information so you can apply it to solve a future puzzle… I don’t think there’s room for that, but it’s an interesting idea and I’m very much keeping it in mind for my next deduction game.

What puzzle games can learn from Nicolas Cage

• I enjoyed this talk about keeping games weird and unpolished! I’m definitely not one to purposefully leave the UI unpolished, but I think this idea is present in the worldbuilding in The Daily Spell: to add interest to the stories, I throw in whatever I can think of as a weird and interesting detail, and figure out the logic later. Which is very risky! But much more with the grain of my brain than trying to nail it all down ahead of time.

Towers of Pen

• I loved Andrew Plotkins’s Hadean Lands, so really enjoyed this talk on puzzles that zoom in and out to different level of details. I appreciated the idea that you don’t only zoom out, metapuzzle style, you also sometimes need to zoom back in and adjust things.
• This was one of the largest influences on The Daily Spell, which doesn’t show up at all in the final game. 🙂 I was already thinking of making a drop quote puzzle game, so I started to picture putting the pieces of the story together with drop quotes, only to zoom out and use highlighted letters from those puzzles for at least one metapuzzle. Drop quote puzzles can be completely ambiguous (if two same-length words overlap), so I imagined needing to go back and tweak the lower-level puzzles to get the needed letters for the zoomed-out puzzle. This was my idea when I started coding.

Newspaper Games

• Daniel King’s talk on the history and current state of daily puzzles is the most obvious influence on The Daily Spell. Even more than you might think: when I first read the talk title, “Newspaper Games”, I thought, “Wow, a whole talk about narrative deduction games where you find clues in newspaper articles??” I was equally happy to learn it meant daily puzzles!
• Despite being into daily puzzles and thinking about a narrative daily puzzle for a while, I wasn’t convinced I should try to make one myself for the jam - was I really going to commit to having a new puzzle and story every day? But after coding up the drop quote puzzle and sharing an update with Rose, she said I should just do the daily puzzle… so I blame her.

Doing my best to stick in CorgiSpace, I decided to try making a daily puzzle and keep it going for a few weeks as an experiment to see how it would go.

💚 How it’s going

I managed to get the game ready and a handful of puzzles to start with by the end of the jam. Then, since there was no rating period, I just kept going with polish, improvements, and writing a whole lot more puzzles!

Here’s a few technical points of interest:

Puzzle setter tool

I turned my initial coding of the drop quote interface into a puzzle setter tool where I can try out headlines and adjust the width of the puzzle to get a satisfyingly full grid, ideally with interesting or tricky overlaps and few awkward orphan letters. What exactly makes the most satisfying drop quote puzzle is something I’m still learning, but having this tool lets me quickly try out ideas.

Itch iframe woes

Like any jam game, I put The Daily Spell on itch. Besides convenience, it’s great for discoverability: my followers see the game, people finding it via Thinky Games can see Jamwitch’s other games, and people playing and rating the game could help it get in front of other players. It also provides a comment area for people to discuss the game.

The downside is I discovered certain issues with the game being embedded in an iframe.

1. Programmatic write to clipboard is blocked in some browsers, like Chrome.
2. Safari seems to mistrust localStorage from a non-top-level site and will remove players’ saved data.

Sharing is a big part of daily puzzles, and following and possibly referring back to the ongoing story is a very big part of The Daily Spell, so these two issues are very unfortunate.

I added some workarounds:

1. Allow users to copy the share text directly if writing to clipboard fails.
2. Offer an option to reveal all past puzzles, so you can look back at them even if your completion of them wasn’t saved.

Those have worked well enough for the past month, but these gaps did motivate me to set up a new standalone site for The Daily Spell, www.the-daily-spell.com. I decided that for now, I’ll keep both running, and I’m hoping people will still rate and review the game on itch and participate in the community board. Let’s see how it goes!

Butler

Despite having posted games on itch for almost 10 years, this is the first time I tried the command-line tool Butler to deploy my game. It’s so easy!! I’m never going back to zipping the game files, editing the game on itch, and uploading the zip folder again. This convenience is great when I’m always making tweaks or uploading puzzles at the last minute, and especially now that I want to keep itch and the site in sync. (The site is on continuous integration from my git repo, so that’s even easier.)

I just run one command and the game is updated in moments!

butler push js jamwitch/the-daily-spell:web

💙 Keeping it going

To convince myself to go through with my daily puzzle experiment, I planned to try running it for about a month and see how it goes. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see people enjoy the idea, but not think it worked well as a daily puzzle, in which case the experiment was successful at discovering something and I could put it to rest.

But I’m happy to report that people have been playing it as a daily puzzle! The hitcount has been shockingly steady the past three weeks from people actually playing every day. I’ve heard people look forward to the story and chat about it with other players. I’m thrilled about this! And just slightly apprehensive that I have to keep coming up with stuff!

I like making small games, so working on this one game and adding on to the story every week is a daunting prospect. But I also know from my many game jams that the best way to accomplish something is to have a deadline and people looking forward to it, and I have that now, so I should be good to keep it up for a bit longer. 🙂

Thanks for reading and for your interest in the game!