I got to write a few puzzles for the Indian Puzzle Championship this year! Thanks to Prasanna for allowing me to write puzzles (bold move for a contestant to recommend constructors!).
The contest this year was structured in three rounds. The first round involved genres that appeared previously in 2021 Puzzle Ramayan rounds. For this round, I decided to take two genres I was fairly comfortable constructing: the Kakuro and the Akari. (I also could have taken the Yajilin, but I figured that genre has been a bit over-saturated lately so I decided not to.) I'm pleasantly happy with how these turned out -- the Akari feels like an "Easy" difficulty Nikoli puzzle, while the Kakuro has a nice flow to it despite not being a pushover.
The second round consisted of genres that are somewhat common, but otherwise didn't make it to the PR rounds that year. I decided not to write anything for this round because I figured other constructors were more familiar with the genres in question (and after a certain point that column became quite crowded, anyway).
The third round, though, is where things get really interesting. This round consisted of genres that are relatively rarer on puzzle competitions. (For a sense of what "rare" means, I think the most common genre on the round was Castle Wall.) There were a few genres suggested to us, but we had the ability to go wild and write puzzles for any genres we wanted. I used this opportunity to design puzzles in three genres I had always wanted to write but rarely got around to.
The first puzzle I wrote in this round was the Cross the Streams puzzle. This genre is amazing and really should get more attention than it does. (For the most part, CtS seems to be restricted to GMPuzzles.com.) I decided to go with a bit of a "malleable" theme -- that is, one that isn't so restrictive like Murat's recent 123 puzzle. This one ended up being a fairly smooth puzzle to construct.
The second puzzle I constructed for this round was the Icebarn. This genre is also fairly uncommon, but lydian's puzzles in the PC discord have shown that the arrow clues have a lot of power (and I definitely adopted some of their style when constructing this.) This puzzle was a bit of a headache to construct, but in a good way; all I'll say is that the right hand side of the puzzle was not purposely sparse.
The last puzzle I constructed for this round was the Hebi-Ichigo. I was introduced to this genre through puzz.link, specifically Bachelor Seal's puzzles. This genre is cute! While there may not be as much depth in Hebi-Ichigo as there is in, say, Tapa or Fillomino, there are some cool things you can do with it and I'd like to see more puzzles in the future. My goal with this puzzle was to make something on the easier side for the contest, and I think I delivered. The theme was also kind of accidental; the original version of this puzzle didn't have the 3 clue in R2C4, but I added it in because it made the solve smoother (at the expense of a bit of logic that I decided was a bit too hard for my goal, anyway).
This will probably be the last post on my blog for 2021; apart from a few puzzle projects, I'm taking a bit of a break for now. I tend to not look back on my progress as much as I should, but I'm quite pleased with how my puzzle construction skills have improved over the past year, and I think my IPC puzzles showcase this quite well. I still have a long way to go to improve on the more subtle aspects of puzzle design (and on my puzzle-solving ability in general, oops!), but the base is there. Here's to 2022!
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