Thanks for making this and I wish you all the success in the future.
I'm not sure if it would fit the theme, but sometimes I end up searching what an expression means, or where does it come from. Maybe it would be cool to have a little info box after you discover what the word is. Just an idea! Not sure if it would clutter things, and you can always search it yourself, but something I've been thinking about. I still remember looking up peanut gallery and sand dollar!
That’s a fun idea. I often stumble across fun facts while making the clues. I’ll think about this more and experiment a bit when I have time!
Just tried it out on my browser. Will be following this.
Also would love to see your workflow you spoke about, on coming up with puzzle ideas and tile arrangements. Cheers!
would be super interested to hear more about the puzzle-making process too, is it fully automated with AI at this point or is there still a good amount of manual work and fine-tuning involved?
bookmarked already, can't wait to play tomorrow again
It’s a lot of manual work right now. I don’t use AI in the process. I think it could help with some of the brainstorming but I kind of like the human connection of making a puzzle and having people solve it.
Here’s the basic process.
My wife and I do this part together:
- Think of a theme
- Think of words related to that theme, ideally with a second meaning
- Think of clues for those words
Once we have a good set of clues I plug them into a program I wrote to make crosswords.
The program isn’t that smart. It tries making random crosswords. I run it 1500 times and then sort the results to get the best ones. This brute force approach works pretty well for how simple it is.
I pick the crossword I want and then I use another tool to split up and rearrange the tiles. This step could probably be automated but there’s some finicky logic to the best way to split up the tiles and it goes pretty fast manually.
I’ve been meaning to make a video of the process! I’ll share it here when I do
The design and dev took a while but building the has been the most time consuming at this point. My wife and I make the puzzles together.
We’re getting close to 6 months of daily, hand crafted puzzles!
I’d like to write up some blog posts about this. Are there specific animations you’re interested in?
The overall tech stack is Vue and Nuxt. I just added user accounts and auth using Supabase.
I also animate the size and color of the stroke and scale and translate the entire tile