Puzzle #600 - Interconnected Secret

This year for Secret Solver I was assigned feadoor, someone I know is quite a good solver and constructor across a variety of puzzle types. I wanted to try to lean into as much of those types as I could, remembering the Skyscrapers and Sudoku from a GP round, Yajilin from Yajilin and Variations, and Heyawake from Heyawake Hike. The rest of the genres were picked to cooperate with the connections between grids, and lead to a final secret. I did a lot of planning before any actual construction here!

Anyway, here's all the rules. The short version is that standard rules apply for each individual puzzle, and that cages marked with the same letter must have the same pattern of shaded cells. Country Road requires all regions, and unused cells are considered shaded. Nanro (Signpost), the numbered cells are considered shaded. Skyscraper Sudoku is 1-6 in each row, column and region. Domino Yajilin counts the number of shaded cells.

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I really should have taken my own advice and not made an interconnected puzzle - it's very stressful when something starts not working, or seems like it might not resolve. I also ended up doing most of the writing over 2 days, with a few scattered bits of progress before that point. I even brought a notebook with transcriptions of the starting points (determined links) for 3 puzzles to a relatives' for Christmas Eve, and finished those puzzles there!

To think my original idea involved having to figure out the cage matching as part of solving... that would have been impossible within the time I ended up having, and especially with the other constraints.

Puzzles #592 & #593 - Thinking Rooms (Heyawake)

Some number of months ago, someone pitched the idea of a future where AI and other tools are used to replace the creative process of making puzzles. I - and others - thought that, uh, sounded like a horrifying dystopia. I made three Heyawake puzzles to attempt to show the different sides of tool-assisted construction, and make the point that a human touch is always going to be better.

I started with this layout, which was an attempt to have a manual seed that I would just bash numbers into until I had a working puzzle. However, this process ended up requiring a lot more manual effort than I expected as there would frequently be multiple or no solutions from a given start. I'd say the tool use definitely helped with the construction, but then again without attempting to use the tool I probably would have settled into one of the more forcing starts more immediately.

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I then made another puzzle entirely by hand, only using the tool to verify uniqueness. Given the shorter timeframe and that I'd already made a puzzle with an unchecked difficulty, I aimed intentionally a bit easier.

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I, uh, also went out of my way to make a completely unchecked abomination of a puzzle with no intended solve path, just for the potential extreme of a generated puzzle. I... am not going to link it to not subject any puzz.link/db users to the puzzle, but also... just look at it.

I don't know about you, but that's not a world I want to live in.

Puzzle #552 - Penalty Heyawake

Something I've seen happen more often recent is genres to have some sot of "theory" developed for them, utilizing the underlying structure to prove something must be true within the bounds of a puzzle. One older example of this is Yin Yang never being able to have a checkerboard pattern, while the most well known recent examples are penalty and river Heyawake. These are pretty hard to explain and pretty hard to understand, though basic applications are fortunately approachable enough. Here are three explanations if you want to dig farther into the topic. I was pretty happy to find an antisymmetric construction for this grid size.

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For this puzzle, the basic calculation will prove that there must be the maximum number of shaded cells on the edge and exactly zero loops of unshaded cells. In other words, 0 penalties or inefficiencies in the packing.

Puzzle #492 - Rever Theory (Heyawake)

This Heyawake puzzle I made for Rever contains no river theory. It does contain a river, though.

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What did you really expect from the Witness Randomizer community?

Also, Rever's initial thought for a request was to have someone unrelated come up with a prompt that we would both make a puzzle for, to see the divergence - that never materialized and I had this idea (and knew Rever had made a number of Heyawake puzzles) and while it's not what Rever would have ever come up with as a request, the puzzle was very much appreciated.

Puzzles #480 & #481 - Heyawakes for the Hike

Heyawake Hike recently concluded on LMI as the 8th daily contest since their revival. The puzzles were made by Sam Cappelman-Lynes and are generally very excellent, I'd highly recommend trying them out. I'd also like to congratulate nishinanntoka for a phenomenal performance as well.

But first, here's a puzzle I made.

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This is definitely the sort of design that looks like it would be unfair, but there's some surprisingly neat logic to be found here.

Anyway on the competition - I managed to win! (I recorded a video but halfway through it loses audio for no reason so it's useless)

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Just like Nurimisaki Nomad, I made a trophy shaped puzzle to celebrate. Unlike Nurimisaki Nomad, I actually made this before attempting the final puzzle to try to practice a bit. And I basically never practice for competitions - it psyches me out too much to do anything more than solve a couple puzzles to get into a more deduction-focused mental mode.

In other puzzling news, I also crossed 2700 rating on puzzleduel (being the third solver to do this, after Ken Endo and Freddie Hand) and then reached 2738 (and counting???) in the process of clocking the first? 3000 rating full week (Caiji logged 3200+ on the same week but didn't attempt the hardest puzzle) and dominantly winning Doubleshow 7. If this first week of the new year goes well I may reach an astronomical 2750 which would, I believe, be the highest rating peak in the history of the site, done at a time when the competition is fiercer than any past peak. Even if not, I reached 2700 which has been a pipe dream for a long time, considering my peak before October was about 2650. I don't know what happened to me these past few months but something must have clicked.

Puzzle #266 - Seaweed in the River (Norinori/Heyawake)

Believe it or not, I had actually thought about this variant series and done some brainstorming for ideas a few months ago, and adding the Heyawake three room restriction to Norinori was one of the ideas I was most looking forward to. (This puzzle is a Norinori where no orthogonal line of unshaded cells can pass over two room borders) Cut to a month or so ago, and some new Heyawake "river" theory is all the rage, regarding adjacent narrow rooms, and there's room for a play on words with this variant. Maintaining my desired theme proved challenging, especially while trying to close out the puzzle uniquely. Quite a rewarding process that I'm glad I committed to though!

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Puzzle #174 - Irregular Gate (Heyawake)

Even though I made four Heyawake puzzles a while back, none of them used non-rectangular regions. So I decided to explore a couple themes with irregular regions, and though my first two attempts went nowhere I did hit on this central theme that I like quite a bit. The theming on each side was secondary but ended up working out nicely- I had forgotten exactly how much weight the standard Heyawake rules could pull, if they needed to.

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Puzzle #44 - Fourfold (Heyawake)

For my American solvers, happy 4th of July! For everyone else... happy 4th of July anyway! Have my 4th Heyawake puzzle and my 44th puzzle posted on the 4th day of the... 7th... month. Okay that timing could be slightly better, but that's a lot of fours!

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Not a lot of 4s in the puzzle, though.

Puzzle #43 - H E Y A (Heyawake)

W A K E

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Yes, this is another Heyawake puzzle. I may have developed a bit of a personal style for them already.

Puzzle #42 - Unevenly Spaced (Heyawake)

Another Heyawake puzzle. I actually made this one first, but thought it fit better as a second puzzle.

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Update: added a clue to fix uniqueness.

Puzzle #41 - Mostly Empty Rooms (Heyawake)

I've been attempting to work backwards through every pzv link posted on Twitter for a while now, and over the past month there's been a lot more Heyawake than normal. This is a genre that I used to not understand at all, and though I still don't totally understand it, I'm competent enough to solve and by extension, construct.

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It turns out, making Heyawake is pretty hard! I've got a few more of these coming, but no Heyawacky (same rules but far less restrictive on puzzle layouts).