post · October 8, 2026 · 4 min read · By Jeff Neet

From scribble to island

My toddler drew loops on notebook paper. Five steps later he was riding a dinosaur round them. Each step kept the one before it as its reference, which is why the island is still his.

My three-year-old can’t draw a map. He can draw the layout of one, and that turned out to be the part that matters. The island in Teach Your Dino Bible Stories, the game our family built this month, has the shape it has because of a page of loops he made with a pen. We never asked an AI to invent a world. At every step, the thing before it stayed on the table as the reference.

Here is the whole chain, with what I typed.

1. The drawing

A sheet of lined notebook paper covered in looping pen lines: one large ring in the middle, a chain of small loops down the left side, and a tangle at the bottom

One big ring in the middle. A chain of small loops down the left edge. More loops at the top left, and a tangle at the bottom. To a grown-up it’s a scribble. While he marked up the page, I had him tell me what he was picturing.

2. One sentence to an image model

I photographed the page and gave it to ChatGPT, on the Go plan, with one sentence:

Reimagine this as a top-down map of an animal island using Paw patrol color scheme.

A bright cartoon map of an island seen from above, with a mountain and lake in the middle ringed by a trail, a row of tide pools down the west beach, a treehouse, a snowy corner, a town, a harbour and a farm

Put the two side by side and the loops are all still there. His big ring is the trail round the mountain and the lake. Down the left, the chain became a row of tide pools along the beach. At the top left, his loops are trails winding round two ponds under a treehouse. That tangle at the bottom is a town.

The model supplied the places. He supplied where they go. The lookout tower on the east side comes from his favourite show, and so does the palette, because that’s what he asked for.

3. A world traced from the picture

The picture became the plan for a 3D island. One file in the game traces it: the coast, the rivers, the trails, each landmark. Open the game with ?map and you get the same straight-down view to check against.

The game’s island seen from straight above: a volcano and a lake in the middle, a snowfield at the top right, a town with a fountain at the bottom, a farm at the bottom right and coves along the west beach

The trail loop, the rivers and the bridges are as drawn. Some things changed on purpose:

The snowy peak is a volcano, with the waterfall coming out of a cut in its side.
The show’s lookout tower is a ranger tower.
The tide pools are four coves and a lagoon.
The town’s plaza has a fountain in the middle.

4. Regions, drawn over his map

An island needs to know what grows where. So one of the agents built a small page that lays the concept picture under the game’s island, with a slider to fade between them. A region is a shape drawn over part of the map, with a name and a kind of land. It runs on its own address, so I can work on it from my phone.

The region annotator: the concept map with 13 named regions outlined over it, from Treehouse woods and Snowfield at the top to Town, Harbour and Farm at the bottom, and a list of the regions and their kinds of land beside it

The designer agent drew the first 13 from the map: Treehouse woods, Tide pool beach, Waterfall lake, Lighthouse point and so on. I can redraw or rename any of them. The designer reads the same file, and so does the code that scatters plants and rocks.

5. A place worth exploring

A child riding a whale round the island, with the lighthouse, the treehouse and a dock behind

Then we filled it, together. We explored what was there and made notes of new things that would be fun for him to discover:

a dinosaur companion that grows with him
hang gliders, and thermals to ride up on
a farm, a treehouse and lighthouses
a day and night cycle
music that changes from one region to the next

The Bible stories on the island leave things behind when you finish them, too: the animals from the ark move in, and a whale turns up off the lighthouse.

Whether a toddler enjoys it isn’t a matter of opinion, because the game records play. Tuesday’s session was 45 minutes: 30 dinosaur rides, 11 glides, 9 trips in the treehouse basket, and into the water 34 times.

Why it’s still his

Every step had a reference it couldn’t ignore. The image model had his page. For the 3D layout it was the picture, and the regions were drawn on top of both. Nothing in the chain started from a blank prompt, so nothing drifted far from where it began.

He scribbled a world, and now he plays inside it.

If you want to try this with your own kid, start with the drawing and keep it. Ask the model to reimagine it, not to imagine something. Then keep the result on screen under whatever you build next.

The game is our family’s entry in the Gloo AI Hackathon this week, where it was selected as a finalist. You can play it in a browser.