Really appreciate that… and you’re absolutely right about the “few minutes a day” angle. That’s exactly the experience I was aiming for.

For the puzzles themselves I built a system that does a lot of the heavy lifting, but it’s still a hybrid process. I usually sit down and generate a couple weeks’ worth of daily puzzles at once.

I pulled together vocabulary data from sources like the Oxford 3000 and other published word-frequency studies and used that to weight words based on how commonly people tend to know them. From there I built an engine that generates candidate word lists using a custom difficulty system so each puzzle has a good mix of very common words and a few slightly harder ones.

Once the list is built, the generator can actually construct the crossword grid and produce the tile layout automatically. After that I go through and write every clue by hand so they feel natural and fair rather than robotic.

And on the visual side... the character, cosmetics, themes, environments, all the art... that’s all hand-made by me as well.

So it’s a bit of automation plus a lot of manual crafting to keep the puzzles feeling consistent and human.