Early IBOL Brainstorming
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 … Continued
Game Assets: To Script or Not to Script? GPT Changes Everything!
This past weekend I used Google Bard to save me a little time updating some game assets (I wanted to try out Bard’s new PaLM 2 model first, but I tried Bing AI and ChatGPT as well). I’d estimate it … Continued
9 Slicing Walls
In Surprising Diagonal Movement Challenges, I mentioned that 9 slicing walls (a.k.a. wall slicing) is our solution to prevent the ChipWit from appearing to be stuck inside a square when it is actually allowed to move diagonally. The ChipWit wants … Continued
THINGs in the 1984 ChipWitverse
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 … Continued
Interview by @TeaLeavesProgramming
We’re honored to have Peter B. (Host of the Tea Leaves Programming YouTube Channel) amongst our fans of the game. Peter picked up on our post about FORTH Programming Language and generously offered to do a ChipWits interview on his … Continued
Surprising Diagonal Movement Challenges
In a recent devlog post, we discussed Rotating 45 Degrees. Given a rectangular grid, the original game design allowed for diagonal movement rather than restricting to horizontal and vertical movement. This poses some surprising challenges. First, a tiny math refresher… … Continued
FORTH Programming Language (Going FORTH)
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 … Continued
Rotate 45 Degrees
ChipWits wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if your robot couldn’t turn. Doug Sharp and Mike Johnston, the original designers of ChipWits, made two important decisions that affect the gameplay: The operator that causes ChipWit to rotate 45 degrees left or … Continued
History of ChipWits Part 1: The Title
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 … Continued
Robot Claw
Perhaps the most important way your ChipWit interacts with the world is to pick up items. This is done using the “PICKUP” operator, which extends a robot claw and picks up whichever item is directly in front of the robot. … Continued