Puzzle #701 - Dumbbell Dichotomy (Regional Yajilin)

This Regional Yajilin puzzle was yet another yet another insomnia puzzle. I'm really surprised that I managed to find this while laying in bed, unable to fall asleep, given how involved some of the logic I found is. Anyway, puzzle!

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Puzzle #700 - Archipelago (Pentominous)

Let's do this Pentominous puzzle a little differently than usual.

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The past few years I've played a lot of Archipelago games, which is a platform for generating and hosting multi-game, multi-world randomizers. This is one of the coolest software projects I've ever seen, that constantly expands as more people support more games. I actually played some of the predecessor - that being Berserker's Multiworld (for Link to the Past) before losing interest in that particular randomizer, and having the server sit idle in my Discord list for years.

Then NewSoupVi and Jarno implemented Sigma's Witness Randomizer into Archipelago, and Vi has continued adding new features and quality of life for over 2 years at this point. I really do recommend giving it a try if you want to play an old game in a new way. If you know me, you know I'd done a good amount of speedruns of that randomizer before, so this was a push back into the multiworld space - and at that time, there were about 15 games supported. There's now about 60, and a ton more unsupported or work in progress games. I've even been helping get an implementation for Ape Escape together, having done all the logic (nobody knows that game better than me) and recently even helping with code now that the project has changed hands and I was given direct write access.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is, I made a puzzle using the AP logo as my grid shape, and everyone should go look into it to see if the project is interesting to them. Someone is even working on a world for Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection with a lot of support for choosing what types of puzzles show up. Now if you'll excuse me, at the time of this writing (September 15th, 3:17 AM) I need to get to sleep so I can wake up in time for a Touhou event where I'm planning on doing an AP game using an Impossible Spellcard Manual and Bumper Stickers, followed immediately by an Ape Escape community game on the most recent world for that - which includes a starting gadget option implemented entirely by me. (update a couple days later: both went very well!)

Happy solving!

Puzzles #697, #698 & #699 - The Shape of an L Dissection

These three are.. a bit strange at first glance, so I'll present the puzzles first with a brief explanation, and then a longer description afterwards.

One night I couldn't sleep, as often happens, and started thinking about puzzles, as also often happens. I ended up thinking about trying to specify a large empty area for a puzzle with only a single rule: divide the grid into L trominos. That's it. I pretty quickly found an empty 6x6.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

I then wondered if this construction could tile vertically - it could not, but I did find an empty 6x8 - surely this was as big as it could go.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

Just as I was about to give up and try to go back to sleep again, I had one last idea, and by some miracle it actually worked, and I found a way to specify an entire empty 7x7 space with just L tromino tiling. I wonder if bigger is possible?

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

But why was I even thinking about this sort of shape dissection in the first place? Well, it turns out to have the same answer as to why I jumped straight to region division for LS56, which turns out to be the same reason I gravitated to Light and Shadow-likes a couple years ago. Lunarch has been working on another puzzle game for the past months, and I've been hard at work on the puzzle side of this game as well. There's so much more than just this little teaser shows...

In other news, as of about today I can share up to 172 of my Islands of Insight puzzles, as long as I only provide static images for those puzzles, and do not myself provide a means of solution checking those puzzles. I'll have to filter through my archives for what I consider the best of the bunch, and I'll probably put together a single PDF collection of some of my highlights from the game. This is completely separate from the unused prototype puzzles I alluded to however many posts ago, which will have solving interfaces and solution checking.

I've been busy, even when this blog hasn't been. It's been hard to find the drive to keep updating it given the overlap with what I've been doing for work (spreadsheets for organizing and the like), but I'll try to keep on top of things at least a little better going forward. No more 6 month backlogs. I hope.

Puzzle #696 - Overlooked (Hotaru Beam)

When I was assessing my puzzle backlog for this archive dump, I found that I had an extremely strong milestone puzzle for #700. However, I only had enough puzzles to get to 699. So I asked the Witness randomizer community for a puzzle type to make, and the exceedingly more likely to be sharing the same brain cell as me Exempt-Medic suggested Hotaru Beam. This was an excellent choice, and even moreso considering I somehow had never made one before this!

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Puzzle #695 - The Other Backlog (Castle Wall)

Last year before the World Puzzle Championship, I printed off or started a few GMP ebooks to get some practice on a few key genres. One of those was Castle Wall, where I solved about two thirds of the book on the plane ride to Toronto. But that left me with some loose papers of unsolved puzzles that just sat there for ages, as I caught up with and finished the puzz.link database, worked through parts of Toketa 11 that I got at the event, the usual contest routines... until, at the time of this posting, about a month and a half ago. I finally just sat down and started finishing these ebooks, and in doing so I obviously did Serkan's giant Castle Wall at the end of the book. There was one particular section that I kept wanting to make a particular deduction that was very close to working, and ultimately was never used in the solve. So naturally, I made a puzzle using that deduction.

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Now I just need to find progress on the last 4 pencil Tapa LITS in Toketa....

Puzzle #694 - Large Areas Only (Norinuri)

Nearly every Norinuri puzzle has to rely on either low numbers to fill space, or large ? numbers to fill space. At one point, I tried making one with only 10 clues, but couldn't quite finesse a solution grid. In the attempt I did find this one with only large, but not excessively large numbers, and it turned out there was a nice way to clue it, too.

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Puzzle #693 - One, Two, Slitherlink!

Someone shared with me a giant and quite difficult Slitherlink using only 1 and 2 clues. You know the drill by now, I wanted to try making one that was a bit more reasonable in scope, and for a bonus challenge, I did so without any border clues as those can given some really easy freebie deductions. If you know one specific rarer pattern, this should be pretty straightforward.

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Puzzle #692 - Speedwriting (Cave)

I wrote this Cave puzzle in 5 minutes after a brief discussion about trying to write a good puzzle in 2 minutes. I had most of a puzzle at that time, but elected to try to finish it off more nicely rather than just throw out a half baked puzzle. I got a bit lucky with a deduction in this just kinda working, and putting this post together - including getting links, getting images, tagging and scheduling - took longer than making the puzzle featured here.

Kind of insane.

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I definitely don't regret having this blog set up as an archive of my puzzles, but man is it a lot of work sometimes.

Puzzle #691 - Variant Masyu Day!

It's Masyu da- I already made this joke. About two and a half months ago, a couple people in Puzzlers Club were making meme Masyu puzzles with the variant rule that circles didn't have to be visited, but any circle that was visited had to be satisfied. These were memes because the solution would frequently avoid touching any circles, sometimes even just being a simple 2x2.

So I made a much harder puzzle to show that this variant did not have to just be a meme. It was a bit of a struggle, though, since I decided to start making this on my phone and quickly regretted that decision.

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Puzzle #690 - Masyu Day!

It's Masyu day! Because any day can be Masyu day if you post a Masyu that day! (hi wolog)

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Okay, so the real context for this puzzle is somebody - this was so long ago I don't recall who - posed the idea of collaboratively making a Masyu puzzle where one person places the black pearls and then another makes the puzzle unique with white pearls. I wasn't sure it would work too well, but then I had the idea of trying that relay-style approach here to end up with a different kind of theme than I usually would, and ended up with this pretty neat puzzle.