Tower Before Dusk: I Built a Puzzle Game for Humans and AI
This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam It's interesting how the most exciting ideas always arrive when I have basically no time to work on them. A few weeks earlier, I had finished my submission for the GitHub challenge by bringing an old WinForms game back to life. That project turned out to be a lot of fun. Then Sylwia Laskowska published a great article about Google's WebMCP . The idea fascinated me, but I wasn't sure where I could actually use it. Then the June Solstice Game Jam was announced. The idea hit me like a lightning bolt: What if I made a game that both humans and AI could play? Let's do it. What I Built I created a puzzle game with a solstice theme called Tower Before Dusk . The goal is simple: reach your home tower before sundown. Every action costs time. Every step brings sunset a little closer. Rivers block your path, rocks force detours and the only way across water is to collect enough wood and build bridges. Move too much, collect unnecessary resources, or choose the wrong path, and night will arrive before you make it home. The challenge isn't just solving the puzzle. It's solving it efficiently. And apparently, that's difficult for both humans and AI. Video Demo In this demo, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite tries to solve the level using the exposed game tools. It fails, then I restart the level and solve it manually. That failure is part of the point: the tools worked, but reasoning through the puzzle was still hard for the lightweight model. tower-before-dusk.gramli.workers.dev Code Gramli / tower-before-dusk A TypeScript puzzle game demonstrating WebMCP, where humans and AI solve the same challenges under the same rules. Tower Before Dusk Tower Before Dusk is a tile-based puzzle game about reaching the tower before sunset. Plan each route carefully: every move spends daylight, trees provide wood, and water can only be crossed by building bridges. The game is built as a modern browser app with TypeScript, HTML canvas, and Vite. It also ex