u/samcornwell

Gonna ironically preface this with: I haven't written the text below with an LLM.

boxxy.io

So I thought I'd show you what I've made over the last couple of months, because for me this has probably been one of the most rewarding uses of AI I've found. Please be kind, I spent a lot of time making this and writing the post here.

More than anything, AI tools have helped me on my coding "journey". It's something I've started and stopped for about thirty years and never really got to grips with properly. I've always understood how websites, software and apps are put together, and I've always been quite good at understanding the structure and logic of how something should work, but the actual coding side has always slowed me down.

Level 15 of The Jigsaw level Pack on Boxxy.io

It's called Boxxy and it's my version of Sokoban, the Japanese box pushing puzzle game. Sokoban has been around since the early 1980s and has become a bit of a cult game online. There are thousands of levels and lots of different versions of it, and making your own Sokoban clone almost feels like a rite of passage for any fans of the game. My goal was to learn how to do it, prove I could do it, and make something I was proud of.

The whole thing has taken me roughly two months and cost me about £50, which is basically two months of ChatGPT Pro and the price of a domain. It was made solely with ChatGPT in a browser. I have not even touched Claude once. I don't have wee little AI bot workers doing things for me in the background. This was a series of requests, answers, outputs and iterations.

Anyway, I started with the absolute bare bones of the game. Make a level appear, make a character move around it, make boxes move properly, work out when a level is finished. Once that was working I started adding level packs. Then aesthetics, then all the hidden stuff to keep it going and looking good and able to grow.

Selecting a level from the Boxxy.io originals level pack of 50

The level design is completely manually done. All the original Boxxy levels and level packs I've made myself, without ChatGPT or generative AI. That has probably been some of the hardest work in the whole project because good Sokoban levels are surprisingly difficult to make. You can spend ages creating something, solve it a few times and then realise there's a stupid shortcut or that it just isn't very interesting. I've enjoyed that part enormously though.

More recently I've been working on the less glamorous bits behind the scenes, like user accounts and server side stuff, which probably aren't very exciting to anybody playing it but was a big deal for me personally. A couple of months ago I wouldn't have really known where to begin with any of that. But now I have got a contact us page and even user logins! Something else I have kept making sure is that I don't have to rely on lots of outside servers or tools or plug ins. Almost everything is in house, apart from the Cloudflare connection which I need for the domain. This was so I won't have to go and fix things in the future when little plug ins and stuff fail.

video game play walkthru of a few early levels

I suppose this is where I don't quite know what to call the way I've made it. It obviously isn't traditional coding, because ChatGPT has written a huge amount of the actual code. But I don't think "vibe coding" quite covers it either, because I'm not just asking it to make things and accepting whatever it gives me. I've had to understand how the whole thing is structured, decide how I want it to work, test everything, find problems, reject bad solutions and sometimes tell it that the entire approach is wrong and needs doing again. I'm constantly using the phrase "do not patch this, we need to fix it from the base level" to avoid messy coding I've even delved into the code a few times myself to adjust things by hand! Go me!

A very good programmer friend of mine described what is happening now in a way that really stuck with me. He said that English is effectively becoming another programming language. He's a vastly better coder than most and even he said he barely writes code by hand any more because AI is doing so much of that part of the job for him. (He uses Claude btw)

Linus Torvalds (Linux) has made a similar point recently too by comparing AI tools to compilers. Compilers didn't stop people being programmers, they just meant programmers no longer needed to write everything in 0s and 1s.

My coding pal also said something pretty salient. In the 1980s games were often made by one person or a tiny team. Over the years everything became much bigger, more expensive and whatnot. Because of AI and coding it's started swinging back in the other direction now with tiny indie teams making games. I reckon that's pretty poetic. Reminds me of Halt & Catch Fire and their Mutiny startup!

I suppose this is where I don't quite know what to call the way I've made it. It obviously isn't traditional coding, because ChatGPT has written a huge amount of the actual code. But I don't think "vibe coding" quite covers it either, because I'm not just asking it to make things and accepting whatever it gives me. I've had to understand how the whole thing is structured, decide how I want it to work, test everything, find problems, reject bad solutions and sometimes tell it that the entire approach is wrong and needs doing again.

Anyway, Boxxy has very much been a labour of love. There isn't a client and I didn't start it because I thought it would make me money. I've just really enjoyed making it, which is probably why I've kept disappearing down increasingly unnecessary rabbit holes with it. After about thirty years of occasionally thinking "I'd love to be able to make that", I finally can, and that's been quite a nice feeling.

Made sure it works well on phones, tablets and large screens. Lots of ways to interact.

Anyway, above are some screenshots and a bit of gameplay. If you fancy having a look at the game itself, I'm sure you'll be able to find it online.

Some rough facts and figures:

- Built with ChatGPT 5.6 on high in a browser. Had to start several dozen chats which was laborious as you had to get each new chat to relearn.

- Is currently about 25mb in size, has around 30,000 lines of code, is written in Javascript, CSS and HTML , is currently on v282 (around 300 iterations in total)

- Took about 2 months to get to this point, working on it several hours a day sometimes.

- I have built 4 level packs by hand which total 113 new levels + around 100 more which haven't been released yet.

- My children say the character "looks AI" so I have commissioned them both with making new sprites for me! We'll see how that turns out.

- Cost in total, including the OpenAI subscription, about £50

- Works on a browser, works on a mobile, works on an iPad

- Is not making any money. There's zero ads and zero sign up.

- Most recent things I've built are a contact us page (which didn't require buying a mailserver, yay) and a user login to save progress.

- What I'd like to do most at the moment is make it into an app that can be launched on Apple TV.

- The backend of Boxxy is gigantic. I've also built my own level maker, level pack builder, solver and whatnot.

- It has a tonne of easter eggs which I've always loved!

I joined Mensa when I was 11, and I've always been drawn to things like chess, puzzles and problem solving. Recently, through a fondness of the game when I was a child, and a bit of spare time, I built a Sokoban game called Boxxy, and one of the unexpected things I've found most interesting is watching how differently people cope with exactly the same problem.

If you've never played Sokoban, the rules are almost absurdly simple. You walk around a maze and push boxes onto targets. You can't pull them. That's essentially it. Boxxy is this, it's essentially based on Sokoban, a cult 1982 Japanse game. "Sokoban" translates to "warehouse keeper".

The more I've worked with it, the more I've started thinking of Sokoban a little like chess. Not because the games are particularly similar, but because both have an extremely small set of rules from which an enormous amount of complexity emerges.

I also think both have that strange quality where a position can look completely obvious to one person and almost impenetrable to another. How a 300 elo puzzle can baffle one, while a 2000 elo can be solved simply by another who recognises a pattern.

I've now made several level packs by hand, and creating them has made this much more apparent to me. Some levels that I consider extremely easy have surprisingly poor completion rates. I've seen puzzles where roughly half the people who start them don't finish them. For example this puzzle:

Daily Boxxy #3 people found extremely hard.

What's particularly interesting is that it doesn't always seem to correlate with whether somebody would normally describe themselves as "good at puzzles".

Some people appear to look several moves ahead almost automatically. Some seem very good at recognising that pushing a box into a particular square will make the entire puzzle impossible long before it actually happens. Others repeatedly make the locally obvious move and only discover the consequence afterwards.

There's also spatial memory, planning, restraint and perhaps something resembling the pattern recognition you get in chess. It has made me wonder what we're actually measuring when we say somebody is good at problem solving.

Is Sokoban ability likely to correlate strongly with general intelligence? Spatial reasoning? Working memory? Chess ability? Experience with similar puzzles? Or is there a fairly specific mental skill being exercised here that somebody can be unusually good or bad at regardless of conventional measures of intelligence?

I'd be especially interested to hear from people here who play chess or do a lot of formal puzzle solving.

One other thing I've become fairly evangelical about is keeping Boxxy pure. There are countless modern versions with switches, portals, different coloured boxes, special tiles and so on, but I increasingly think the original rules are perfect. In the same way that millions of chess variants exist but ordinary chess remains endlessly interesting, Sokoban doesn't really need anything added to it.

The part I've enjoyed most wasn't actually programming Boxxy. It was making the levels. I spent about as long creating the first 50 levels by hand as I did building the game itself. I've since made several more themed packs, all manually, and there's something rather satisfying about trying to make a puzzle not just difficult but elegant and visually pleasing.

If anyone wants to try the thing that prompted all this, it's boxxy.io. It's free and there's nothing to install.

But I'm much more interested in the question than promoting the game:

What do you think is actually happening cognitively when one person can immediately “see” the solution to a spatial puzzle that another intelligent person genuinely cannot?

Something peculiar happened around 9 or 10 pm last night. Where I would usually see one or two sales a week I received a dozen throughout the night for Olympic 50p coins. I spoke to another trader who had ordered some from me and they said they just received loads of orders as well.

Has a new story come out and gone viral somewhere? Has something else happened to prompt the uptick?

Are you a trader on eBay and have you see any difference over the last 24 hours?

Sokoban is a cult computer game from the 1980s in Japan. It's spawned many variations and takes, but nothing beats the original. Push boxes onto targets!

Enjoy over 100 brand new, never before seen levels. All completely handcrafted and tested - with no AI used to generate them at all.