PUZZLE25
Version 0.2.2
Thinking About the Future
July 6, 2026
18 Puzzles
Another Adsense rejection, it continues to be an ongoing process. I am still confident that as I continue with ongoing updates and building more content this problem eventually solves itself, but it does hold up a broader release. It's important to me to have time with the ads in place to tweak layouts and experiment before going public with it, and Adsense also provides good metrics of page usage that will be interesting to look at as I go.
The magic squares puzzle from last week turned out to have two solutions, and did take quite a bit more time than I expected to "debug". I do consider it a fairly novel idea and am going to spend more time playing with it. Mathematical analysis of the magic square makes me hopeful that a 10-clue puzzle will be possible in the future but I did end up adding an 11th clue in order to fix the single solution in this case.
The bigger conceptual leap this week was in making designs for a future "Chapter" of Puzzle25. The original design goal was to have 25 puzzles and 25 journal entries and then be done with it, as I find myself more engaged with the concept as time goes on and thinking of it as an ongoing pet project, I realize that I need to eventually move beyond these initial design constraints - more books, more mechanisms, perhaps more of a story, etc. I have exciting designs for the next machine which will feature more of a systemic puzzle - slowly unraveling an alien number system and learning to do more complex operations with a sort of alien calculator. This is heavily inspired by my current playthrough of the Myst series and concepts from Riven and Revelation in particular. Stay tunred!
Until next week!