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Socoder -> Art and Sound -> Picross Editor

Thu, 31 Jul 2025, 06:48
Jayenkai

Picross Editor


I need a bazillion little Picross designs.
I've been saying this for bloody ages, but don't ever seem to find the time to start making them.
Wanna help me make some?

I didn't code an editor for it, and instead got the A.I. to make one.
It did a might fine job of it, too.

The Picross Editor is live.

The engine can handle different sizes, but I think for the most part I'll probably be using 8x8 more than any other size.
You can design puzzles with colour, or just black and white if you prefer.
The more the merrier.
The engine "should" (!! Ai.. Who knows!) be able to backtrack from the puzzle clues to figure out if a puzzle is solvable, and the save button will work or not based upon this check.

um..
yeah, I think that's everything.
Have at, and make me some puzzles!!!

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Thu, 31 Jul 2025, 14:26
Jayenkai
Thanks Dan
Fri, 01 Aug 2025, 12:12
Jayenkai
Copy+Pasted from this morning's AGameAWeek blog

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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.!!!!



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