This was the second Yajilin puzzle from my somewhat recent LMI contest, Yajilin Yacht. A solution video for the contest puzzle can be found on the contest page. Additionally, I've included four prior versions of this puzzle because the evolution of One Up was interesting, to see how I got to the final puzzle.
This is honestly one of my favorite puzzles from the contest. It takes a simple theme that's difficult to execute well and manages to avoid the most common traps, which my earlier iterations ran headfirst into.
Version 1 met most of my goals as a construction - one clue per column, at least one shaded cell behind a clue - but the regularity of the solution as well as most shaded cells being directly in front of their clues was unsatisfying. So I kept going.
Version 2 I liked slightly more, but the presence of a clue in row 2 really irked me, along with the left side instantly fully resolving. So I kept going.
Version 3, on a re-solve, is actually a pretty good puzzle. It still has a few properties I didn't love in the trivial left and the shaded positions, but I was finally getting somewhere. But could I do better by giving up one one clue per column?
Version 4 hit on a very good start to the puzzle that I ended up preserving for the final version. However, having it in columns 3-6 made resolving the rest difficult to do nicely. I likely would have gone with this version if I hadn't continued trying with the setup moved to columns 2-5 instead, which ended up working much much nicer.
Many of the other puzzles in Yajilin Yacht went through a similar process of exploration, however most of the other puzzles didn't produce completed, working puzzles along the way. Just alternate implementations of similar ideas, or things I backtracked to try a different approach.
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