First, some fun stuff.

I created a couple of visualisations this year because I thought they would look cool.

I've stopped doing it for debugging purposes. If I cannot fathom what is wrong from the code, breakpoints and watches, I'll create a quick-and-dirty console dump of the state. Once I've figured out what is going on, that console dump gets deleted as I don't like it polluting my code.

As usual, MonoGame was my weapon of choice. Source code here.

The pattern is the same as before... the visualisation kicks of the puzzle in a separate thread. The puzzle the pops relevant state changes onto a queue for the visualisation to pick up when it needs a new state. This allows for animating the visualisation. It also means that the puzzle is often finished before the first few frames of the visualisation have rendered.

The new ones I created this year were:

• Day 12 Part 1 and Part 2. I'm particularly pleased with this one, because I think it looks cool, but also because it's my first venture into 3D. I'd always used 2D sprites and tiles before.
• Day 14 Part 1 and Part 2. A fun one that reminds me of a convoluted egg-timer.

Here is a playlist of all my visualisations.