The canvas
Open any bot in the library and choose Edit visually (block editor), or start from an empty canvas. The toolbar across the top adds blocks; the canvas holds them; the panel on the right configures whichever one you have selected. With nothing selected, that panel shows the bot's own settings — its name, its picture, its description, its engine overrides.
Blocks come in two kinds. Pinnable blocks — Strategy, Rule, Mood, Adaptation, Challenge, Engine — are always on: they apply for as long as their conditions hold. Flow blocks — Opening, Flaw, Condition, Scout — sit in a chain and hand control to the next block along, which is how a bot branches: play the book while it lasts, then fall through to the plan.
The cleanest way to make your own bot is not to start from nothing. Open the bundled bot closest to what you want, change one block, and Save as a new profile. The original is never touched.
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The ten blocks
The whole palette, in toolbar order. Every one of them is demonstrated by a bot that ships with the app, so you can open the example rather than read about it.
| Block | What it is for | Always on | Bundled example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening | A memorised repertoire, as a branching tree of lines | No — flow | Learn: The Italian Game |
| Strategy | One phase of a game plan, with goals and an end condition | Yes | Solid Positional |
| Rule | A hard do or don't, applied to the moves themselves | Yes | The Bishop Sniper |
| Mood | Personality sliders. One per bot | Yes | Aggressive Attacker |
| Flaw | A deliberate, human-shaped weakness on a trigger | No — flow | The Flawed Attacker |
| Condition | A yes/no fork in the chain | No — flow | (used to branch a plan) |
| Scout | Watches every move for one tactic, and pounces | No — flow | Botam (Rook Scout) |
| Adaptation | Changes behaviour when a situation holds | Yes | The Chameleon |
| Challenge | A pass/fail rule for the human, not the bot | Yes | The Pacifist |
| Engine | Which engine actually plays the moves | Yes | Strong Goliath |
A single block is already a working bot. Camille Mood Only has no rules and no plan at all — its entire character is one Mood block with the aggression turned up. Camille Strategy Only is a two-phase plan and nothing else. Both ship, both are playable, and both exist to make the point that you do not have to fill the canvas.
Personality
The Mood block is the bot's temperament, expressed as sliders rather than rules: how hard it pushes for its goals, and how willing it is to take a draw. Mood changes the flavour of everything the bot does. It does not forbid anything — that is a Rule's job — and the difference is easiest to feel by playing Camille Mood Only and Aggressive Attacker back to back, since they share a mood and differ only in the rules stacked on top.
A plan in phases
A Strategy block is one phase of a game plan, and it has three parts: when the phase ends and what comes next, the goals the bot pursues while it lasts, and how hard the engine is told to push any one of them. Chain three of them and you have a bot that opens one way, squeezes another, and converts a third — Solid Positional and Endgame Technician are both built this way.
Goals are concrete things an engine can be aimed at: control a file, post a knight on an outpost, trade into a won ending, keep pawn tension, attack the castled king. Phases end on conditions you pick — a move number, a material count, an open centre, a queen trade.
Describe it instead
You do not have to fill the canvas by hand. Camille can hand an AI a copy of its own authoring guide together with your description, and read back the profile it writes:
Create a cautious 1650-rated bot from this description: it values king safety, avoids speculative sacrifices, and prefers closed centres. Save it, run a two-game match against the standard Camille engine, then explain one move where the bot followed — or broke — those instructions.
With a desktop AI connected, that single request builds the bot, saves it, plays it and explains it. Without one, the same flow works by copy and paste. Either way the profile lands on the canvas as ordinary blocks, which you can then edit like any other. See Your own AI.
Save, verify, share
Save writes the bot to your library and offers Save as a new profile so you never overwrite the thing you started from. Diagnostics separate errors, which stop a save, from warnings, which tell you a block will never fire — a phase whose end condition can't be met, a rule that contradicts an earlier one.
Verify bot plays the bot against itself and its stated behaviour, and tells you whether the rules you wrote actually bite. Export writes one file containing the bot, its picture and everything it needs; the person you send it to imports it and plays. A bot's picture is stored as a small square copy inside the profile, so the original file on your disk is never moved or referenced.
You can also give a bot a picture from the editor: Choose image opens a framing step where you drag to reposition, zoom with the wheel or the slider, and rotate photos that came off a camera sideways.
