hutt's puzzle dump

 I've been making progress with lots of different kinds of puzzles this month. For the classics, I finally found the time recently to buy a puzzle game about a week and a half after its release; I've been spending so much time solving it that I've already unlocked part of the postgame. For other games, I've reached the two-thirds point in my latest pack and I've recently been invited to help design puzzles for a small project. For mysteries, I figured out on a surface level what happened to the Kudamono editor: I'm pretty sure it's just being migrated to a new domain, and I'm feeling optimistic that nothing is truly lost. For metapuzzles, I continued work on coding my puzzle solver to the extent that it can solve the example Norinori puzzle in a reasonable amount of time. Currently, my largest stumbling block is trying to figure out how to represent whether two specific cells are orthogonally connected as a Boolean expression of whether specific cells co...

 There's been a couple of new important releases this year in terms of metroidbrania sudoku. I've gotten through the smaller one and most of the way through the larger one. While I was solving them, it occurred to me that most of the variant rules included in these massive puzzles have already been established as sudoku variants. I find it particularly interesting to consider that clues often resemble their conventional symbols despite the logical solve path assuming the solver doesn't know what they mean until they're explained. Maybe this is intentional thematically in the same sense that someone might discover a useful trick or a secret passageway on their own in a game. But for me, I see black dot and my brain wants to go on autopilot, but I feel like I owe it to the creator to restrain myself until I see the popup that explains them. I think it would be fascinating to see a metroidbrania sudoku in which every single variant clue type is unheard of to the veterans. ...