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 ...

    Another one of these hybrids between Disconnection and Tapa. I've been made aware this was also known as Tapa (Double Back) in previous TVCs, but honestly I think the association with Disco nnectionworks better since those are both shading genres. In any case, the puzzle shouldn't be too hard, hopefully it's fun! Difficulty: 2.5/5  (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 orthogonally connected groups of shaded cells. No 2x2 area may be entirely shaded. Clues cannot be shaded, and represent the lengths of the blocks of consecutive shaded cells in the (up to) eight cells surrounding the clue.  Play on penpa https://tinyurl.com/y896jl96

    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...