Update: October 2026
Last year, the way I tried to improve was through establishing atmosphere and making the puzzles not feel contrived. Although I completely avoided framing this year, I think I improved at least slightly in several other aspects. Whereas last year I lifted the personalities from another project, this year I essentially started from scratch with the worldbuilding and characters. Yet, I believe doing so made the characters more interesting. The energy of Troll 1 shines through, and I found it especially fun to write Terra's dialogue while considering how her syntax and lexicon would've been shaped. There's still a lot of filler puzzles, especially in the first part, but I tried to justify it by building on prior puzzles' ideas as I did last year. There are also small nods to the hidden plot in seemingly unrelated portions such as the trees in Miniature and the wheel of Contraption. Less prior puzzles are truly necessary to understand the meta, but by using the abilities constantly, I feel like I've made it more cohesive.
In between working on the challenge for the month, I also started making a spreadsheet inspired by recent language learning games, but I think I'll set it aside to focus on getting the alpha stage done for QL. I'm sure I could get the alpha done within the month if I tried. The more I pay attention to what kinds of paper puzzles get recommended to people, the more I believe QL could end up being my most popular project.
After coming up with the plot point involving the map, I found out I had actually forgotten about a map-based puzzle I'd set. The following puzzle was set on 3/11/25.
Cartography was invented by machka.
Rules: Place each shape from the bank given outside the grid into the grid so that no two shapes share an edge and all unused cells form one orthogonally connected area. Rotating and reflecting shapes is allowed. Cells containing compasses cannot be shaded. A number in a compass indicates the size of the connected unshaded area which covers the cell directly in front of the number and lies entirely further in the indicated direction than the compass itself.
The shape bank for this puzzle is all five different tetrominos exactly once each.
