Richard Moss, author of the book The Secret History of Mac Gaming, has agreed to give ChipWits fans an additional £5 off for those who use the code CHIPWITS when ordering his book. That’s on top of the existing £5 discount, bringing the price down to £19.99 (approximately $24.99 USD), just in time for the […]
When Mike and I developed ChipWits to the point where we could play it, we realized that we needed to add some randomness to IBOL. Let’s see why it was important to add the random COINFLIP operator, and get a preview of the dev gameplay while we’re at it! Without a bit of randomness, ChipWits
ChipWits is both a serious and a light-hearted game. Serious about teaching computer science. Light-hearted because our ChipWits wear roller skates and drink COFFEE and perform robot music. We included Carusoid (a musical robot) in the original Commodore 64 version of ChipWits in 1984. A ChipWit is not a mech firing mega-lasers at enemy mechs.
When Mike Johnston and I created ChipWits in 1984 we never dreamed it would live again nearly 40 years later. When I assembled the team to reboot ChipWits — Mark Roth, Alex McChesney, and Jared Farney — I didn’t just want to recreate the original game with a few improvements. I wanted to create a
IBOL (ICON BASED OBJECT-ORIENTED LANGUAGE) is the part of ChipWits I’m most proud of. Mike Johnston and I did a good job of creating a useful, fun language that is easy to learn and use. We cut the number of OPs (operators) and ARGs (arguments) to the minimum while still making a real programming language.
One of the challenges of designing ChipWits was to come up with a simple but fun world for the bots to play in. When Mike Johnston and I started to shape our vision of the game we spent a lot of time coming up with a list of THINGs for the ChipWits to eat, zap,
Why was the FORTH Programming Language used to create ChipWits? Long, long ago in an ancient era (1984) when microcomputers were a new thing, Mike Johnston and I fell in love with the Macintosh and bought one (for $4,700!) on which to create ChipWits. We immediately ran into a big problem—we didn’t have enough money
How the Heck Did Mike Johnston and I come up with ChipWits? Hi, Doug Sharp here. Mike Johnston and I designed ChipWits, coded it, and published it in 1984. I’m proud of the game and thrilled we’re rebooting it. I’ll talk about the history of ChipWits in this series of Dev Log posts. Today I
ChipWits by Doug Sharp and Mike Johnston In March 2008 ChipWits was named one of the Top 10 Apple II/Mac Games of all time by Maclife.com Thank you, WayBackMachine, for preserving these dead pages. “ChipWits is a program that every Mac user should have.” Byte Product of the Month (1985) “If you have only one entertainment/educational program
