CastMe Devlog

CastMe is built and maintained by one person. This is a running log of what's changed and why — mostly for players who are curious what's new, partly so there's an honest record of how a solo daily-puzzle project actually grows. Newest entries first.

Six Degrees of CastMe (Beta)

A fourth mode, and a different kind of puzzle than the first three: instead of revealing a cast one actor at a time, you're given two actors and have to connect them through a chain of shared films — name a movie your current actor was in, pick a real costar from that film, and repeat until you reach the target. There's no losing state; every valid chain eventually gets there. What's graded is how well you got there — an Efficiency score (how close your path was to the true shortest connection) and an Obscurity score (how deep-cut the films and actors you used were, compared to the obvious route). A hint system exists for players who get stuck, but leaning on it too much zeroes out your score for that attempt rather than quietly rescuing it.

Six Degrees launched in Early Access for CastMe Premium players first, with a vote-to-unlock prompt for everyone else — partly to stress-test the scoring and puzzle-generation system on real play before opening it up, partly because "coming soon" felt dishonest for a feature that might take months to fully season. Early Access is the honest version of that: it's real, it's live, and it's not final yet.

The Hub redesign

Every new visitor used to land directly inside a Movies puzzle — the thinking being that a guaranteed-good "welcome puzzle" was a safer first impression than an empty menu. In practice it meant every cold visitor's first choice was made for them, regardless of what actually brought them to the site. The hub is now the default landing point instead, with a short welcome popup for brand-new visitors that lets them pick Movies, TV Shows, or Connections themselves. Direct links (movies, TV, Connections) still skip straight to that mode — the hub is the default for someone with no stated preference, not a forced extra step for everyone.

CastMe Connections

A third daily mode, and a different kind of puzzle from Movies and TV Shows: 16 actors on a grid, and the job is sorting them into 4 groups of 4 by a movie or show they share — no guessing a single title, no cast reveals, just pattern-matching against a web of overlapping filmographies. Groups run from more recognizable casts to genuinely obscure ones, and every puzzle is exclusively movies or exclusively TV, alternating day to day. It shares the same daily-puzzle backbone as the other two modes — one puzzle, everyone plays the same grid, free to play the day it drops.

CastMe Premium

Today's puzzle has always been free, and always will be — Premium exists for the players who want more of it: the full archive instead of just the last 2 days, Hard Mode, a Bot Replay that shows how CastMe's own solver would have worked through that day's puzzle, and deeper stats (rank against every other player, hardest solves, most-recognized actors). Some of the earliest, most active players were grandfathered in for free — a small thank-you for playing before there was any reason to.

TV Shows

The same core mechanic as Movies — guess from a slowly-revealing cast — applied to television instead of film. It runs as its own independent puzzle and archive, not a reskin, since a TV cast (rotating over seasons, guest stars, ensemble shows) behaves pretty differently from a fixed film cast when it comes to picking a fair, satisfying reveal order.

The beginning

CastMe started as exactly one thing: a daily movie puzzle where you guess the film from its cast, one actor revealed per wrong guess, six tries. The first version was about as bare as a working puzzle can be — a database connection, a "today vs. yesterday" puzzle, and cast photos on flip tiles. Almost everything else in CastMe now (the archive, streaks, stats, the other three modes) grew out of players actually using that one puzzle daily.

What's next

A public launch for Six Degrees, once Early Access has run long enough to season the puzzle generation and scoring. Beyond that: a more consistent daily posting habit, since distribution — not more features — is the real bottleneck for a project like this right now. See the About page for more on how CastMe thinks about difficulty, fairness, and design.