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 […]
Will you be able to beat the world’s top ChipWit programmers? One of the features we’re most excited about in the new reboot of ChipWits is making it a leaderboard game. Here’s a preview of the leaderboard in our latest development build: The leaderboard is enabled on some missions, and lets you compare your solution
Back in olden times when programmers had to finger-paint our 1s and 0s on cave walls, players actually wrote snail mail letters to publishers. I’m glad I kept this one. It’s a combination of a letter of complaint and a fan letter. Brainworks is the publisher of the Apple II and Mac versions of ChipWits.
We’ve been hard at work on the main storyline of the ChipWits reboot and want to give you a sneak peek at one of our missions under development this week. The mission takes place on the exterior of a space station. Your ChipWit needs to clear away parts of a nebula that have been blocking
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.
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 saved me a few hours in total. Not a big deal. But the bigger deal
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 to get that pie, but can it escape? With wall slicing, it’s obvious to the
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,
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 channel. In the interview, we cover lots of topics, including: Here’s some information about Peter’s
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… For those who need a refresher on the pythagorean theorem, the diagonal of an isosceles
