bakpao's puzzles

I've been playing around with various constraints to add on to Rassi Silai, in light of the Rassi Silai contest happening on LMI right now. These are two variants  that I think combine well with the genre. Setting the Skyscraper one gave me a particularly hard time. I'm not sure if I was just a bit out of it or if it's actually hard to construct a decent puzzle using this mechanic, but in the end I managed to set something I was happy with.  Difficulty: 2.5/5 for both Rules (classic rules from Puzzle Rules ) Within each region, draw a non-intersecting path through the centers of all cells. No two cells in the grid containing endpoints of paths may be touching one another, not even diagonally. For Icebarn: A  path cannot turn on an ice cell, can cross itself on an ice cell and must visit all ice cells in its region. Ice cells cannot be endpoints. For Skyscraper: N umbers outside the grid show the number of separate path segments visible in that direction. A segment of len...

   What's this? A classic tapa puzzle on my blog?  A couple posts back I wrote that I intend to publish more puzzles on this space, but that's not why I'm posting this one.  I like playing around with pzprRT, in particular with tapa. I enjoy looking for themed grids (an  example ), but I'll be the first to admit t here's also a very big temptation to make incredibly bashy puzzles. Most of what I set using the tool thankfully never sees the light of day (other than perhaps the CTC discord), but every now and then you stumble upon something special.  This is such a case. A Seeing Double theme (inspired by  this excellent puzzle  by Sam) and an enormous empty middle - yet somehow it's unique. It took an eternity to find, and finding it was only part one - it needed to have logic too. I had to solve it a couple of times and have it tested by Freddie (thank you as always) to convince myself the path through is fair, even though it certainly has i...

    Here's something new and funky - a hybrid between Disconnection and Tapa. I started playing around with Disconnection not too long ago, and came up with some nice puzzles, but it's ridiculously difficult to set. I often needed to give freebies, relied heavily on the same type of deductions and faced uniqueness issues around every corner.  I tried looking for modifications to the ruleset (such as regions with clues denoting the amount of shaded cells in the region) and genres to combine it with, and I particularly liked the logic that came up with Tapa. I decided to try and write a full puzzle around it. There may be more soon, there's tons of interactions to explore here.  Difficulty: 3/5 (more for novelty than complexity, I suppose) (rewritten version of base rules for Tapa and Disconnection, both of which are taken from Puzzle Rules ) Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Each region must contain exactly two separate or...

    A variant Tapa puzzle using bigger clues. We had a speedset on this variant in discord a while ago, and while I wasn't really happy with what I set back then, I did keep it on my list to revisit. I now finally have! Difficulty: 2.5/5 (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded cells in all of the cells which touch the clue orthogonally or diagonally. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded. Play on penpa https://tinyurl.com/ydexg39v

   It's been a bit quiet on here, so I intend to set some more puzzles suitable to be published on my blog. Here's a  Nurikabe-Like Loop puzzle.  Difficulty: 3/5 (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Draw a non-intersecting loop through the centers of some empty cells. Every orthogonally connected area of cells not visited by the loop contains exactly one clue, the value of which represents the size of the area. Play on penpa https://tinyurl.com/yb2w4p93