Truly nice! Reminds me of https://10print.org/

Really fun. Thanks for sharing!

Some random ideas:

It'd be cool if you could start the growth engine from manual mode. Maybe for breadth-first growth you could add all the placed characters, and for depth-first just the last cell you clicked (+ some kind of visual feedback to show what that is)?

I'd also love to play with some way of enabling/disabling the characters to create a subset and see how that behaves.

One last thing is it'd be nice to toggle the grid lines off.

Feel like I've seen a similar tool Ben Hecks used in one of his projects making a game badge, able to look at a character like an Invader

Awesome! Have you thought about adding a PETSCII font?

The UI gives me intensely wonderfig xfig vibes

This is WILD. good clean safe pareidolia fun.

Beautiful!

Speechless. I love this kind of creativity and agency.