Puzzle 45 (Top Heavy TomTom)

Top Heavy TomTom is a hybrid puzzle I first discovered during Puzzle Ramayan a few months ago.  This afternoon, I finally did the higher valued puzzle from that contest and was inspired to write one of my own.  In general, setting puzzles with more "global" constraints (e.g. Nurikabe, where you can't just add new clues at random) is not a strength of mine, but I'm happy with how this turned out.

Place a digit from 1 to 4 into some cells in the grid so that no digit repeats in any row or column, and all digits within the range appear exactly once in each row and column. Some cells remain blank.  The cages follow TomTom rules, and the grid follows ‘Top Heavy’ rules (that is, if two digits are in vertically adjacent cells, the greater of the two digits must be on top).  Also, all cells of the clued TomTom cages must contain digits, i.e. cannot be empty.

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Puzzle 44 ("Fan", Kakuro)

Geez, Kakuro puzzles are such a pain in the rear end to construct, especially considering the puzz.link implementation is not the smoothest (so this was constructed on paper before transcribing into the interface).  Thanks to the Puzzler's Club discord for making me realize that an extra clue was needed.

EDIT (8/19/2021): I've added a Penpa solving link and changed the image of this puzzle to that of the Penpa interface.  (For Kakuro puzzles, I strongly prefer Penpa to puzz.link.)

Online interface (puzz.link)

Online interface (Penpa) 

Puzzle 43 ("Cubic Function", Yajilin)

Still on the Yajilin hype train, though I may be switching tracks at some point soon.  Might start setting some Akari in the near future, since I've been doing a lot of those puzzles lately and have finally started to get comfortable with some of the harder logic.

This puzzle in particular was a bit annoying to construct, though it was not nearly as difficult to make as, say, Puzzle 39.  The original graph of the cubic function was a bit less spaced out; this made for a pretty interesting start to the puzzle, but ultimately the white-space near the top and bottom of the grid proved to be too difficult to resolve in only ten clues.

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Puzzle 42 ("Two More Squares", Yajilin)

Got incredibly lucky when setting this Yajilin.  Usually, getting the ending to resolve uniquely is the hardest part of setting a puzzle for me, but in this instance one of the first things I tried worked, which made me very happy.

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Puzzle 41 ("CTC", Battleships)

Participated in another speed-setting event in the CTC Discord this morning.  This time, the task was to construct a Battleships puzzle in 60 minutes.  Battleships is a genre I don't have much experience with, partially due to it not being on puzz.link, partially due to not getting into the genre that much.  This puzzle happened to get 5th place (tied with Prasanna!), which was nice.

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Puzzle 40 ("Square", Akari)

Two posts in one day again!  This time it's a little Akari puzzle I whipped together that got positive reception in the PC Discord.

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Puzzle 39 (Yajilin)

First medium-sized puzzle, and a Yajilin at that!  This one was a pain in the rear to construct; I had to balance a stubbornness for sticking to the theme (no clues in the midpoints of rectangles) and a tendency for deadly patterns to show up in three different places.  Happy that I finally managed to make it work, even if it's a bit easier than I had originally hoped.

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