In an HN post about a very cool PuzzleScript game called Enigmash, I learned sad news.

Jack Lance, the author of the game, died earlier this year.

I went to his website, jacklance.github.io, and saw that it had been updated to refer to him in the past tense.

Seeing that the site is hosted on GitHub, I looked at the recent updates. I discovered two things:

- He made this update himself, to show up a few days later

- He published one last game, Octogram, but unfortunately made a typo in the URL to the game
  - Update 12/30/23: I commented on the git commit and one of Jack's siblings saw it. They pushed a fix and now the link on Jack's website is working!

Here's a working link to Jack Lance's last game: Octogram.

It's a super tricky puzzle game with fun wordplay. Give the source code a peek if you get stuck -- but beware this will spoil all of the answers!


More resources:

- Jack's games
- Jack Lance on Puzzle Wiki
- A blog post about Jack's work
- Another blog post about Jack's work
- Backup of jacklance.github.io
  - Due to some technical details of PuzzleScript, none of his PuzzleScript games are in this repo. Instead, they are stored as GitHub gists. I've grabbed a separate backup of every gist linked to by his games page for posterity.
- A YouTube video where Jonathan Blow mentions Jack's death. "...he was 25... he was already one of the best game designers in the world and was on track to be even better"
- Obituary under his real name