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Inspiration

I wanted to teach my kids (11 and 13) the power of AI and get them introduced to it as early as I could. Vibe coding started to show them that they could create anything they could imagine. Poodoku was born out of a weekend errand run and a funny car conversation!

What it does

Mashes up two popular games: Queens and Sudoku. Adds the twist of clues and deduction to solve a funny mystery: who pooped in the house?!

How we built it

Vibe coded in Xcode using Anthropic models over the course of 2-3 months. We used OpenAI for asset generation.

Challenges we ran into

The most challenging part was creating an AI agent that could make puzzle levels that were a) solvable, b) clear enough for someone to deduce the solution without guessing, and c) had one unique solution per level. This easily took several weeks of trial and error to get the agent built correctly that it could produce hundreds of levels reliably.

The interface was also quite challenging because mechanics that people enjoy from Queens and Sudoku were difficult to implement with Poodoku. For example, Sudoku lets you use pencil marks to include or exclude certain numbers from certain cells. But this works well with 9 numbers because you can identify them simply by position in a small 9x9 grid. Poodoku uses dog avatars; so they aren't ordered and shrinking them made them very hard to tell apart. So we had to come up with another way to let players use pencil marks for the more challenging puzzles!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud that we were even able to build a working game simply by vibe coding. None of us are programmers and we are building a fun, scalable, and engaging game.

What we learned

So many things... How to prompt AI, how to use Github, how to work with Xcode and the Apple app ecosystem, how to build in manageable chunks so AI didn't get carried away, how to beta test with players, how to use social media to promote an app, how to think about monetization strategies, etc.