TinyPicross - Picross for Arduboy

I decided it was time to build another game for the Arduboy, which I’ve written about previously.

TinyPicross is heavily inspired by the Nintendo Picross games, specifically the 3DS and Switch games. Picross (AKA Nonogram) puzzles are logic puzzles where you fill in grid cells according to hint numbers. The Wikipedia article is going to do a better job explaining than I ever would.

While I would have liked to build a random puzzle generator, making one seems challenging, especially with the limited computational power of the Arduboy. A good Picross puzzle should be able to solved entirely logically, so generating puzzles that don’t require guessing is not a simple task.

Instead of generating the puzzles on the Arduboy, I opted to generate 162 15 by 7 puzzles on my computer (using Gnonograms), and store them in flash memory. Since memory is such a precious resource when writing embedded programs, I couldn’t afford to waste any space using a full bool for each grid cell, since a bool uses a full byte of space on the AVR platform. I cut down the amount of space each puzzle needed by packing each 7 cell column into a single byte. By doing this I was able to get the size of a puzzle down to 15 bytes, which I was happy with. A bitmask can applied to the byte to get the value of the cell I need.

Since entering 162 puzzles by hand seemed very error-prone and tedious (see puzzles.h), I hacked together a Ruby script to convert Gnonogram save files into C code. This will make it simple to swap out the puzzles in the future once I finish them all!