Nostalgia

The last two weeks have been a flurry of archaeology! First, a fan found a Mac Diskette With the 1984 ChipWits Source Code. While we were researching and discussing how to read old Mac-formatted disks, Doug Sharp, the original creator … Continued

On August 20th, we received an email from a fan of the original game. He saw our video Interview by @TeaLeavesProgramming about our reboot of the game, and he recalled that he had contacted Doug about ChipWits in the 80s. … Continued

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 … Continued

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 … Continued

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 … Continued

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

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

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