Puzzles #624 & #625 - Sushi Temple (Japanese Sums)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The thirteenth level is Sushi Temple, and is very much a Japanese shrine. Once I got past the idea of using Anglers (fish, ha ha), I went straight into Japanese Sums, which has quickly become one of my favorite number placement genres. It's both so flexible and restricted at the same time, and there's almost always a useful clue to add to disambiguate a problem. Because of that, the example puzzle was a complete non-issue to make, even with a self-imposed constraint of not duplicating a clue value and making sure to show that a question mark is not strictly a single digit number, like in some implementations.

pzprxs interface      puzz.link interface      penpa interface

The 25 point contest puzzle may appear themeless, but it's not. The opening steps and specifically the first few shaded cells form a torii. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have thought to go this route without being aware this is a common shrine element from the Touhou series. Hmmm, that's another idea...

pzprxs interface      puzz.link interface      penpa interface

Puzzles #622 & #623 - Hot Springs (Onsen)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The twelfth level, Hot Springs, was also extremely obvious: it had to be an Onsen-meguri puzzle. Hot Springs is also one of the more infamous levels in Ape Escape, so I had wanted to make this puzzle extremely hard... but by the time I got to it, I was tending way too hard overall, so made this one easier to compensate, ending up at only 5 points. I still kept the "tall" nature of the level in the puzzle, though, and used loops with 2, 3 and 4 not because they're consecutive numbers, but because that's how many monkeys are in each room! Having room symmetry under these constraints was pretty tough to get to work too, for both the example and main puzzles. The example especially since I needed an empty circle - the example is probably harder, actually.

puzz.link interface

puzz.link interface

Puzzles #620 & #621 - Frosty Retreat (Icewalk)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The eleventh level is Frosty Retreat, and this is the reason I didn't use an ice genre for the previous puzzle. Between all of the potential options, I felt like Icewalk would be a more interesting choice than something like Icebarn, and wow, is this a genre that doesn't agree with me. I found it to be a major struggle to set anything up that did anything remotely interesting, and while I got there in the end, I'm not sure I'll be making more of these.

puzz.link interface

As for the competition puzzle, I wanted a ringed island like the one a UFO monkey starts on, and other than that I just didn't want it to be trivial. I ended up with a 20 point behemoth of a puzzle that met my criteria, after having to patch an alternate solution at the bottom in a way that also made the key steps easier to find.

puzz.link interface

Puzzles #618 & #619 - Snowy Mammoth (Four Winds)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

Snowy Mammoth is the tenth level. It has a windy section, so I went with Four Winds. I considered Compass to lean into the "you are lost!" mailbox, or something about an igloo or ice, but... eh, this was what worked best. The example was actually harder to make than the 10 point contest puzzle, something about the layout probably? The contest puzzle ended up with a solid logical theme so maybe that helped too, with always having a clear idea for a "next move" in mind.

puzz.link interface

puzz.link interface

Puzzles #614 - #617 - Dexter's Island (Aquapelago)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The ninth level in the game is Dexter's Island. I went with Aquapelago over something like Nurikabe (Islands in the Stream) or Shimaguni (Islands) or any other island themed puzzle, partly because I liked the rules, and partly because I wanted to highlight some lesser known types and this creation by Walker Anderson needed a spotlight (I made these before a puzzlink implementation!). As an added bonus, this would let me theme the puzzle in an extra way, by cluing an 11x11 with only 6 clues, for 6/11: the exact requirement.

But first, a simple example.

puzz.link interface

The contest puzzle I went with was the hardest of my three options, considering I also thought it was by far the best. It ended up being worth 15 points, which I think is very fair given how the start of the puzzle plays out.

puzz.link interface

My first other candidate is a fine puzzle, but it lacked anything really special in the layout or theming that made me want to use it. Still, it was good practice and gave me a bit more familiarity with the genre.

puzz.link interface

At some point afterwards, I stumbled into a legit opening deduction that I tried using in a 6 clue puzzle. It was never nice to resolve the rest, unfortunately, so I added a 7th clue in the middle and made it an 11. But that requires counting to 11, which is a pain, so I didn't really want to use this puzzle, either. Another good puzzle, but just not what I was looking for for the contest.

puzz.link interface

Puzzles #612 & #613 - Coral Cave

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The eighth level is Coral Cave. Coral and Cave are both existing puzzle genres. Mashing them up in some way was the most obvious pick for any slot in the entire contest. The only question was in what way they would be mashed up, and I went with the outside clues give the lengths of unshaded groups, in no particular order.

The example puzzle was actually harder to make do what I wanted than the main puzzle here! I tried to make it work with all 4s at first and almost had something, but had made a bad step along the process and had to adjust. There are a lot of rules here and I wanted to show as many as possible in a reasonable puzzle.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

The contest puzzle was actually one of the first puzzles I made for this. I still had designs of trying to make the point values for each puzzle match the number of monkeys in the level (8, in this case, out of 204 total) so wasn't aiming too difficult. It turned out I was overshooting difficulty targets on nearly every puzzle, and so this ended up at 15 points out of 300. No individual step is that hard, but there are a lot and the path can be narrow at some points.

puzz.link interface      penpa interface

Puzzle #611 - Crabby Beach (Doppelblock)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The seventh level is Crabby Beach - a relatively smaller level. Doppelblock is at first an incongruous choice, until Beach -> Sand -> Sandwich -> sum between clues from Doppelblock. It's still a stretch, but a justifiable stretch. This puzzle was worth 10 points - I really wanted to have a good break-in using no edge clues, as Doppelblock almost always relies on edge clues. I ended up only using prime numbers, and went through a lot of struggle keeping that theme alive.

puzz.link interface

Puzzles #609 & #610 - Cryptic Relics (Word Worms)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The sixth level in the game is Cryptic Relics, and while I originally penciled in Letter Weights on the monkey names in the level, that quickly proved to be unworkable. But it led me to another idea, what genre could possibly support the list of monkey names? Word Division is a safe fallback but perhaps less interesting than other word genres. Meandering Words was out because some of the words contained double letters... what could possibly support those?

And then I remembered Word Worms / Worm Search from the first EUSPC (2nd incarnation linked - first doesn't seem to have a live link anywhere). That seemed perfect! Taking the monkey name lists from both the NTSC and PAL versions of Cryptic Relics gave a word list with 91 characters - perfect, that's a rectangle! And there's even a double Z, maybe I could put PUZZLE in my puzzle... several miracles later, I had a 30 point puzzle. The example was much easier to make since I already had some experience - I mostly just wanted to showcase every rule with a much more restricted letter bank.

Rules: Place one letter into every empty cell such that every worm can be found. Worms are words that can be read in a path that may bend and move in any orthogonal direction. Every cell in the grid must be part of exactly one worm. If identical letters are adjacent, even diagonally, they must belong to the same worm.

penpa interface

penpa interface

Puzzle #608 - Dark Ruins (Light and Shadow)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The fifth level is Dark Ruins, another sprawling level. The connection here is pretty obvious - Light and Shadow means there's darkness, and so I went with a "dark ruin" aesthetic. There was a time I was considering Nurimaze for this slot and a few other genres that never went beyond "maybe, but nahhh". It kind of had to be Light and Shadow - I have a strong affinity with this type. 10 points is also potentially slightly undervalued, as tests put it at about 12 points and I "had" to round down.

puzz.link interface

Puzzles #606 & #607 - Thick Jungle (Tents)

Before WPC 2023, I ran a Puzzle Getchu!, a contest themed on Ape Escape. I had intended to queue these puzzles for posting before WPC, but didn't have the time. Better late than never!

The fourth level (and first big level) in the game is Thick Jungle, and I actually spent quite a while on different genre ideas before making a Tents. I tried Arboretum first but the genre just does not agree with me and the way I make puzzles. Then I tried helping that by applying a Tents rule as a hybrid (there is a tent in Thick Jungle!) and while I was able to make some good setups with these rules, after a couple hours of trying I found that there would be no way to resolve things uniquely. So, I went with the "boring" option of standard Tents.

puzz.link interface

The 15 point contest puzzle was even potentially undervalued - something I'm quite pleased with as the first Tents I've ever made. It took a few tree layouts (in the shape of a tree) to find something that actually worked and wasn't too forcing before any clues, but was forcing with a few clues. I don't know how I got the row and column clues to match.

puzz.link interface