Yeah that’s how I did it

Decrementing look taking the min of the 3 neighbors plus 1 (or just 0 if the new tile wasn’t clear)

I’ve done a bunch of match3/connect4 minigames, so it seemed “obvious” once I saw what the resulting array should look like — but I shouldn’t assume it would be to others!

You can actually calculate the available area of any given location in at most three checks if you take data from your neighbors and work from the bottom right corner up and left.

Like this article has lived rent free in my head for over a decade now I think about it so often.

Also this is all it takes for them to go from cute to sexy, incredible, I pat myself on the back