Chapter 02 · 4 min read
Sixteen by sixteen, fifteen colours
How a wish becomes a sprite: the palette, the checks, and how Claude draws what you only described.
Every wish becomes a sprite: sixteen by sixteen pixels in a palette of fifteen colours. Small enough to check with a few lines of code, rich enough to draw a lighthouse, an owl or a very small library.
The palette
Each colour has a letter. A dot is transparent. Gold, cream and orange glow at night – windows, flames, lanterns; everything else is seen by moonlight.
kinknnavyvvioletplilacrredoorangeglowsygoldglowsccreamglowswwhiteggreenddark greenbbluettealubrownegrey
A drawing made of text
A sprite is sixteen lines of sixteen characters. That is the whole file format – it fits in an issue, in a JSON line and in a code review.
................ .......kk....... ......kyyk...... .....kkkkkk..... .....kcyyck..... .....kyccyk..... .....kcyyck..... .....kkkkkk..... .......kk....... .......ek....... .......ek....... .......ek....... .......ek....... .......ek....... .....kkkkkk..... .....keeeek.....
The code accepts a sprite when it has sixteen rows of sixteen characters from the palette, at least twenty coloured pixels, at least two colours (an outline and a fill), and some transparent space. Things stand on the bottom rows: the island is seen from above, the things on it from the front.
When you only describe it
Most people will not draw. That is fine: Claude draws the sprite from the words in the wish. Before anything is written, the routine renders its drawing large – with numbered rows and columns, and once more at island scale by moonlight – and looks at it. If the cat looks like a potato, it draws again. Only a sprite that passes the checks can be applied.
Three ways to see it
- In the README, the island is a night picture: the still layers are an embedded PNG (a year-old island would otherwise weigh megabytes as vector paths), the moving ones – waves, twinkling stars, today’s marker – are SVG.
- On this site, every pixel of every sprite is a small cube. The figures turn to face you like paper theatre, pop up on the day their wish came true, and whatever is gold glows.
- On its own, every wish is also a small file,
world/sprites/w<id>.svg, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0.
Messages in a bottle
When no wish fits – or nobody wished – the islanders send a message in a bottle and wish for something themselves. These are the drawings they can pick from:
- A lantern for the path
- A young pine
- A bench for stargazing
- A grey cat
- A bed of night flowers
- A small rowboat
- An owl
- A signpost
- A campfire
- A cottage with warm windows
- A golden fish
- A telescope
- A ring of mushrooms
- A violet tent
- A red kite
- A glowing crystal
- A snail with a golden shell
- A birdhouse