Today's update adds our final weekly bonus puzzle, the DESIGNER'S NOTEBOOK, which is actually not a puzzle but a collection of TWELVE new puzzles based on existing puzzles. What?
During development, I had originally imagined that about 1/3 of the puzzles in the game would be variant puzzles, which required the player to conditionally build one of two different products, in the spirit of the just-in-time manufacturing revolution that inspired the game. One of my favorite examples of this was the "video recorder" puzzle, which originally required you to build both VHS and Betamax variants:
(Traces of this remain in the story, where we learn that Ozeki-san is a devoted Betamax fan.)
We prototyped but quickly cut this feature, as I felt it was too confusing for a game whose entire point was to minimize the "unnecessary complexity" of my previous games. After we released the game, however, I started exploring ways to add some harder puzzles, and ended up coming back to this idea. I re-implemented the feature, updated it to fit the final design of the game, and started resurrecting the original versions of puzzles with variants.
The Designer's Notebook, available at the end of the bonus chapter (unlocked after beating the game's main story), includes 10 new variant puzzles based on puzzles from the main campaign. There are also two non-variant puzzles: my original (and harder!) version of the "pachinko machine" puzzle, and an alternate version of the "chess computer" puzzle suggested by a player on the Zachtronics / Coincidence Discord that is very hard but also very funny. (I have yet to beat it... it's probably solvable?)
