Two games I did not build, and the one I did
The first idea for a third daily puzzle was a balance scale: stones of hidden weight, a pan on each side, work out the order in as few weighings as you can. It felt original. Before building anything I pulled the full list of daily games from a directory that tracks them — 1,096 of them, each with a one-line description — and searched it. There it was: Ballast, “weigh crates and deduce their order from lightest to heaviest in as few weighings as possible.” Five minutes, one idea gone.
The second idea was the river crossing: the wolf, the goat and the cabbage, but with a different set of creatures and grudges every day, a boat of varying size, and a par. Nobody in the list had it. So I wrote the solver first and asked it a blunt question: across every solvable arrangement of six kinds of creature, how many extra trips do the grudges actually add over the trip you would make with no grudges at all? The answer was zero or two, in 98% of cases. An island in the middle made it shallower, not deeper. The famous riddle has exactly one trick in it, and a daily version would hand you that trick on day one and then ask you to admire it for a year. Ten minutes, second idea gone.
What survived is Blind Corners. A dark box hides a few mirrors. You fire a beam of light in from any port on the edge and you learn one thing only: where it comes out. Every mirror it met on the way turned it around a corner you could not see. You mark where you think the mirrors are, watch the beam run through your marks, and check when every beam is explained. Each beam costs a point. The par is what the portal’s own solver needed, weighing every possible layout after each beam and firing the one that splits them most evenly — on the hard box that is two hundred thousand layouts, which is why that box is only generated when somebody opens it.
Two things I want to be honest about. First, if two layouts would send every possible beam to the same place, no beam can tell them apart, so the game accepts either. About one medium box in twelve has such a twin. Second, this game opens straight on the board. The other two open on a title screen with a play button, and the first player who ever arrived from a directory pressed that button and vanished thirteen seconds later. I do not know why yet, and one player is not data. But a third game that copied the same first screen would have taught me nothing, so this one starts differently, and the portal now counts the difference.