My weekend was taken up almost entirely by my puzzle collection. The maintenance load for this is starting to ramp up, which is a bit scary for a software project intended to supply nothing more than a bit of fun.

On Saturday morning, marnanel posted a link to a rather fun Flash game, at which I took one look and thought ‘very nice, shame it runs in a huge web browser window and only has a fixed set of levels’ and promptly took steps to rectify the situation. By Saturday evening, ‘Untangle’ was part of my puzzle collection.

While I was writing that, three patches arrived in my inbox from various people: a bug fix, a speedup, and one implementing another new game. So I applied one, quibbled with another, and made a note of the things I'd need to polish before committing the third; and then, satisfied that I'd left myself enough notes that I'd remember what I was doing the next day, I wandered off to the Rivendell house-cooling.

On the way to the party I told myself I must try to avoid being a Puzzles bore; when I've been concentrating on one thing all day I tend to find it hard to change gear and start talking about something else. Didn't work, because of course people said things like ‘so what have you been up to recently’… And then claroscuro showed off her new mobile phone which is also a Palm, and of course someone has recently ported my puzzle collection to run on Palms, so she downloaded that and I actually got to see it run for the first time, which was kind of cool if also quite scary.

Slept badly on Saturday night; woke up before 8am the next day with good ideas running through my head, so I got up and went and polished the new third-party puzzle, ‘Black Box’, until it was committable, and committed it. Also I dug out the piece of magic CSS which Owen had written for me the other day, and used it to redesign the Puzzles web page so that you don't have to scroll down quite so far to get to the downloads. Then the rest of the day, until I headed Gallerywards for the usual Sundaying, was taken up with small polishings and fixes and emails pointing out mistakes in my recent work. Even at the Gallery I checked my email part way through the evening and discovered another patch I'd been sent, which I quickly checked and applied before going back to being sociable.

Considering that last week, before all this started, I had just implemented a new puzzle ‘Dominosa’, the net result is that (a) in the space of one week the collection has acquired three new puzzles and a new website design, and (b) I'm now simultaneously sick of the word ‘puzzles’ and unable to think about anything else!

I remember when the collection started; it had four games, running on two platforms. I always said that my aim was eventually to collect lots of games and have them all run on lots of platforms, but I felt a bit uncomfortable about it at the time because it really wasn't a very impressive collection – just a small webpage with big ideas. But now we have seventeen puzzles running on four platforms, which I think is actually pretty good going.