Thursday, October 10, 2024

Puzzle #700 - Archipelago (Pentominous)

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


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!

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