Puzzles 184 and 185 (Shikaku)

Whoops, I've been bad at keeping up to date with this!

I've recently been challenging myself to make one puzzle every day in the same genre as the one Bachelor Seal posts on that given day.  Yesterday's genre was Shikaku, which was a great genre to construct on the bus ride home from the airport.  I made a puzzle that, while unique, was much harder than I expected, mainly because during construction I changed a 14 to a 12 which adjusted some other numbers in the process.  Later, I came up with something much easier/closer to what you would find in an actual Nikoli magazine.

Puzzle 183 (Choco Banana)

It's been a while since I last posted here!  Just so I have a post in July, here's a Choco Banana I made last night while streaming.  It's based off of a tilted square theme, but the usual version of this theme felt too clue-dense so I sanded off some of the squares a bit.  Nothing particularly impressive but should be mostly smooth.

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Puzzle 182 ("Rectangles", Slitherlink)

It's another 14x24 Slitherlink!  This one was initially constructed while streaming, but I couldn't quite finish it in time.  Once again, thanks to TostCronch, Thomas Luo, Yosh, and others for technical and moral support!  In particular, Thomas captured my state of mind perfectly with this image during the stream.

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Puzzle 181 ("Empty Middle", Slalom)

This Slalom was designed to emulate the Nikoli style while still keeping the theme.  To be honest, I think the grid needs to be a bit larger for the theme to fully take effect, and one small consequence is that I'm not entirely sure if parts of this are actually Nikoli style.  But I still had fun making this, and I think I gained some intuition about how to make these in the future.  This is probably a bit overclued and on the easy side, but I'd argue that Slalom is one of Nikoli's easiest genres anyway.

Also, some of the implicit requirements for Nikoli puzzles -- e.g. the fact that both ends of a gate need labeling, so you can't label two gates if their endpoints share a cell -- are more annoying than I expected.

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