This article was originally published on Jo4 Blog.
We wanted a fun utility page for jo4.io/u/1024. Something people would open, mess around with for a minute, and then leave running in a tab. We ended up building a 2048-style tile-merging game with level-ups, confetti, and an AI that quietly takes over when you walk away.
Here's how we went from "let's make a simple game" to "wait, we need to implement a search tree."
The Game Itself
If you have played 2048, you know the drill. A 4x4 grid, tiles with numbers, slide them in four directions, matching tiles merge. Our twist: you start with base tiles [2, 4, 8] and the first milestone is 1024. Hit it, and you level up.
