Blog - ✂️ - 01 - Snippity August

1st August 2025

Let's go all in with the AI, today, huh!?!

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I asked CoPilot (in the same thread where it gave me Banana Blast) for a theme for August, and it seemed interested to know what games I'd made for Banana, and then told me I was awesome and how I'm incredibly imaginative, and I'm super and incredible.
.. Because Microsoft have dialled the "be nice" knob up to 1,000,000,000

Anyway, we had a little back and forth about ideas for August, and we ended up with "Snip" ✂️
So, this month's games will all be about cutting, or slicing, or snipping.

Any thoughts, leave them in the comments / Discord

Picross

Spurred on by yesterday's mention of Picross from Michael Fernie, I sat and thought "How best can I make a bazillion Picross images".
I turned to A.I.
If you've been paying attention, you'll know that I LOVE coding, so for the most part I'll do all the coding myself.
But every so often, there's a background tool that I'd love to have, but just CBA doing the Gui and faffing about of the boring bits.
Thank god for A.I.!!!

So yesterday, I started by drawing this..

using Procreate on the iPad.
A minor scribble. Nothing much to it. Just enough to get things going.

I headed to Google's Gemini, and gave it a rather descriptive prompt

HTML/Javascript

I'd like you to write a tool.
I'd love to make a Picross game for AGameAWeek.com, but first I need to design hundreds of puzzles. (ugh!)

What I think I need is a Picross Designer, so a grid on the right, buttons on the left, as shown in the image.
Tap to Plot, tap again to unplot (back to white). If you pick another colour from the left hand bar, that becomes the current plot colour.
We can maybe have a set of alternative colours (say a set of plain red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple)
In terms of data these would be 0= white, 1 = black, 2=red, 3=orange, 4=yellow, 5=green, 6=blue, 7=purple, 8=pink

Let me plot them on the grid.. (if "tap" and coloured then set to white, else pen colour)
The grid should extend up and left like a Picross puzzle, and would register the block counts like a picross puzzle should, accounting for different colours like a Colour Picross game.

The left gui sidebar should also have options for different puzzle sizes using a couple of dropdown boxes for Width+Height (5 to 16 on either one)

The program should also scan the puzzle every time I plot/unplot, to work out whether a human can solve the puzzle using pure logic.

Store the current plotted data in a Puzzle="W=8 | H=8 | Data=0010010040501001001000100505020" string variable.

The "Save" button at the bottom left of the gui should say "Can't Solve" if the puzzle is impossible to solve using just logic.
Otherwise, if the puzzle is possible, then the save button will store the puzzle inside an array of puzzle strings.

Can you build that for me?

That's a fair bit of a waffle..
...
And then I clicked the Go button, and then I got.. pretty much.. everything I'd asked for.

You can download the result of that first prompt here.
Unzip it, it's just a single .html file, and you can read through it in a text editor or open it up in your browser to give it a whirl.

The "solution" logic wasn't 100% at first, though. Placing different coloured icons close to each other, weren't being registered because the logic checker was always presuming there'd be spaces between groups.. so I needed to re-prompt it to fix that.

I also later asked it to do more complex tasks like writing a PHP script that the Javascript could upload to, making sure I gave it enough rules to double/triple sanity-check any and all input. .. and output! And I even added a teensy bit of compression.

I also double/triple sanity checked the whole thing myself because...

Don't trust the A.I.!!!!

But everything seemed good enough to go, and after about an hour or so of "Vibe Coding" (Not sure who came up with that name for doing this sort of thing, but I like it!) the whole kit and caboodle was up and running.

You can Edit Picross Puzzles here.

Edit, enter your name (to go in the credits if I use your puzzle) and then click the Submit button.
It really doesn't get any simpler than that.

I'll probably leave it until September before making a game to go with any of these images, to give myself (and anyone else who wants to join in) plenty of time to make a whole big bunch of images that should hopefully function well enough in the game.

.. Don't worry, I'll be writing the game!!
This was just a quick way to get a tool up and running.
Tools aren't AGameAWeek!

(Except those times when I do properly make tools, obviously!)

A.I. Corner

Lyrics : By ChatGPT. I gave it the quoted bit, above, and asked it to rewrite it as a song.
Sound Imported : Xenial Legacy
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Sung by Suno

"Cartoon @Derek is sitting outside in a deckchair, relaxing, whilst a robot slaves away in the house, cooking, cleaning and vacuuming." by ArtFlow.ai

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Daily Blog , Picross , Evil A.i.

New games every week!