with Wordle, you can generate a permutation of all the English words and run through them in order, one per day, potentially for decades. it's not quite that simple with Optimle, where a puzzle consists of an in-progress Wordle game that's "interesting" to solve in 2 guesses. I had to end the "interesting puzzle generator" brute force script somewhere, and 365 days' worth of puzzles felt like a reasonable number. thus the game launched on February 28, 2022 and concluded on its own anniversary.

I made a point of not tracking page views or completed puzzles or anything here, for a lot of the same reasons as why cohost doesn't show a like or share count. so I don't know how many people would care if I ever brought the game back. but I know that number is at least one (one very sweet person messaged me about it after it ended), and that feels like reason enough to at least consider extending its lifetime.

but... I don't want to just generate another year's worth of puzzles. the brute forcer I wrote led to a lot of puzzles that were only superficially different, and after playing for a few months myself, it felt like I was just memorizing certain word clusters in the common-word dictionary. oh look, another _ITTY puzzle. god damn it, another _A_ER puzzle (those were the worst). I would either need to define "interesting" a lot more rigorously for my brute force script, or design the puzzles by hand, either of which would be fairly labor-intensive.

the other option is that I could loop the existing puzzles and add the ability to play whatever day's puzzle you want. it wouldn't be quite as exciting, but it would at least keep Optimle from becoming lost media, and wouldn't be nearly as labor-intensive. in a world where I have infinite time, I would add new puzzles and the time-travel feature, but I know better than to overcommit, burn out, and not release anything. the scope needs to be tight.

I'm accepting opinions / ideas if y'all have any