PAWMAP

What problem & for whom

For whom: The person who loves their dog enough to plan the whole trip around them.

Problem: Finding dog-friendly places in Spain involves a lot of tabs and a lot of disappointment. Not a crisis. But there was a better version of this experience waiting to be built.

This: A pixel art map of Spain to discover dog-friendly spots worth the trip. Diana built this for Llull and Borja.

The iteration

The first version relied on proximity detection: walk close enough to a pin and the info card appears. It sounded right until it wasn't. Cards appeared too early, disappeared mid-read, and closed the instant the character kept moving because the trigger zone and the dismissal zone were the same space. After several attempts to tune the logic, I stopped trying to be clever. Each spot now has a fixed bounding box drawn directly on the map. The card stays open until you close it. Moving through the area doesn't touch it.

What AI could and couldn't do

Sora handled the full visual world: terrain tiles, trees, decorations, clouds, the paw pin with its glow animation, the portrait of Llull sitting for the title screen. The aesthetic landed on the first pass and held across every asset type.

The sprite was where things got hard. A sprite sheet with two characters moving together in four directions sounds straightforward. In practice: wrong directions labeled, silhouettes bleeding into each other in lateral frames, black boxes where transparency should have been. I gave Sora exact pixel dimensions, exact grid coordinates, explicit labels for each cell. The problems kept rotating, never fully resolving. The shipped version has both characters moving as a fixed unit, always facing forward. Not the original idea. The one that works.

Minimum viable effort

One map. One dog. Walk up, read, keep going.

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