bakpao's puzzles

Last week, the GAPP project in the CTC server reached its 1000th day. To celebrate, the authors (myself included) collaborated on a large shading mashup, which was very positively received by many of our solvers. Feel free to check out the puzzle here , if you are in the CTC discord. Since my 100 blog entries milestone was also coming up, and I never ended up writing a big puzzle when I reached 1000 puzzles authored, I decided to write another puzzle on the same grid we used for GAPP1K, with the same genres and (mostly the same) rules, but without the difficulty cap. I expected the puzzle to take longer to finish, but it seems I got into a groove, and here it is!  Overall I'm very happy with it - I managed to preserve symmetry in all grids except the Half Piece one (where it really wasn't working out no matter what I tried) and built in lots of cool interactions between the various genres.  This puzzle is a fair bit more difficult and narrow than the GAPP one, so if you want t...

I was invited to write some puzzles for the 2023 UK Puzzle Championship! I always greatly enjoy this contest so I was happy to contribute some puzzles for it. I wrote 6 of 30 puzzles, 3 of which fairly common genres, the other 3 fairly new/obscure genres.   The contest booklets are available publicly and can be accessed via  https://ukpuzzles.org/contests.php?contestid=67  (round 1) and  https://ukpuzzles.org/contests.php?contestid=68  (round 2). The puzzles by the other authors are all great and I definitely recommend checking them out as well. Rules are included in the penpa links for all puzzles. Round 1: Cross the Streams - 22/540 points https://tinyurl.com/25dtcuxh A low pointer written at the end of the writing phase to balance out the contest a bit more, as we had quite a few puzzles leaning towards the harder end. I considered writing it around 2 and 3 clues but I had already seen quite a few puzzles of this genre using similar theming this year so ...

I wrote this puzzle a few months ago - my first experience writing the genre. I kept it on the backlog for a while, but with the implementation of the genre over on pzprxs, now seems like a good opportunity to release it. There was a bit of discussion about whether rows/columns  are allowed to be unclued to indicate no  information given, or need to have a wildcard. There seemed to be arguments supporting both sides, but no clear consensus. While the implementation (now) allows for both options, I think my stance for this genre in particular is that because wildcards exist, they should be given, rather than not give any clue at all. Even if zero r/cs are completely pointless and even if for this puzzle it kind of breaks the aesthetic. Difficulty: 3/5 (rules from Puzzle Rules ) Shade some cells so that all shaded cells form one orthogonally connected area. No 2x2 region may be entirely shaded. Clues outside the grid represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded...