A speed setting competition at CtC Discord has just ended. It was my first setting competition, and it was loads of fun. I'm usually a slow-and-steady kind of setter, so I wasn't sure I would be able to finish in time to start with, but I ended up doing alright... well, kinda lol.
The prompt for the competition was to create a snake egg puzzle (rules, for example, here) with a twist, within an hour's time. Not much constraint, plenty of room for creativity. It took about twenty minutes for me to realise that my first idea doesn't work at all, and then it was panic mode. I still managed to come up with an alternative idea and get it working (with a lot of duct tape, so to speak), and even had enough time left to test it. It had a couple of issues though.
First, the puzzle doesn't really have much to do with snake egg per se, as there's no mutual constraint on empty regions. What's worse, however, is that I neglected to read the rules properly and set a 13x13 grid, while the rules had forbidden anything larger than a 9x9. Naturally I was raring to go as fast as possible... who knew elementary-school reading and counting would be my downfall.
Despite being illegal, the puzzle received a honorable mention from the judges, and I think it meets my overall quality threshold next to most other "proper" puzzles I'd made. And it should be approachable too!
Rules
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