norpet is a digital pet with hand-powered logic.
its board (or non-electronic digital screen) consists in a grid of logical operations, one per cell, that you have to follow to bring your pet across its different states of life.
norpet is a proof-of-concept of #beansComputing that we developed for the Virtual Pet Jam 2022.
someone has been playing all the games from the virtual pet jam, and sent us this video where they review our norpet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2daWrBQ8-Mg&t=474s
we think this is a very nice lesson for us in how to convey the gist of the game in a short amount of time :)
@compudanzas I played a few iterations of Norpet yesterday! It was very fun and I gained a better understanding of some basic computing concepts!
@joemama that's great, thanks for the feedback! :)
i feel it like you that it isn't too simple.
and i'm always amazed by it working (e.g. by looking at the increment in the 3-bits counter) even though i made it and i know what's actually happening ^^'
@compudanzas yeah I was also immediately thinking about how to model it with code. I was thinking as each bean a bit and my finger/brain a tape machine, going bit by bit until I reached the 'important' ones that contain instructions, not being able to 'see ahead' to the next instruction. Looping until the program was complete. Very cool. Immediately made me want to write 'optimised' version of the instructions to enable fast play hehe(mostly as a thought exercise, I thought the actual speed of play was fine)
A note on how long it took me: I also didnt clear the "zero bit" beans on each iteration since I knew I would just be putting them back
@joemama very nice! <3
something that i find very interesting here, re: code modelling, is that several parts could be happening in parallel, and therefore there are several ways in which one could "linearize" the whole procedure.
have you seen our coloring computers? https://compudanzas.net/coloring_computers.html
the parallelism from digital circuits is made more evident there.
however, in the norpet i like how the possible paths are kept "hidden" for one to discover, as you did :)
@compudanzas I did three iterations and I believe it took about an hour. But I also drew my own board so that took time. I think the size is pretty good. I felt like mentally I could understand what was happening 'under the hood' but definitely wasnt too simple.