Go Beaver Go

1.0

By eriban, 5 years ago

Games & Apps
META
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Controls: D-Pad: [Arrows / WASD] - A: [J] - B: [K] - Menu: [U] - Home: [I]
Enjoy games at full speed with sound and lights on the Gamebuino META!
Emulator by aoneill

Go Beaver Go is a puzzle game that teaches you basic programming skills. Now you can improve your programming skills wherever you are with your Gamebuino!

The game is based on (a variant of) the esoteric programming language 2L. This is a two-dimensional language that features only two instructions. I will not explain here how those instructions exactly work. That is for you to discover as part of the puzzle experience. The language is Turing-complete which means that in principle it can do anything. In this case, the limited size of the program severely restricts what you can do. Nevertheless, you can write surprisingly intricate programs. The main challenge is to write a Busy Beaver program; a program that runs for as long as possible, yet terminates. The current record is a 7x7 program that takes 33207907 steps to complete. If you manage to beat that, definitely let me know!

Features:

  • Ability to edit programs
  • Ability to run programs
    • Actions: Play, Pause and Step
    • Variable run speed
    • Intensity-based path tracking
  • Tutorial mode featuring seven examples
  • Challenges Mode featuring twenty puzzles
    • Goals: Output value, Reach exit, Run length and Sequence
    • Progress is stored
  • Experiment mode
    • Ability to save and load programs
    • Four metrics: Longest run, Highest output value, Lowest output value and Longest sequence
    • Progress is stored
  • Light effects
  • Basic help

Version 1.0:

  • Added five new challenges
  • Improved various existing challenges
  • Added light effects
  • Improved menu navigation
  • Support more complex programs:
    • Increased data size to 7000
    • Show bigger numbers in Stats screen

Version 0.4.1:

  • Further increased size of data (to 2048)
  • Further increased program store size (to 64)
  • Adapted About view to correctly show Longest Runs of more than one million steps 

Version 0.4:

  • Various improvements to data
    • Increased size of data
    • Improved animation when data pointer shifts
    • Enable user to move data when program is not running
  • Bug fix: Let user store more than eight programs

Version 0.3:

  • Metrics tracking of experimental programs
  • About Window with summary of progress

Version 0.2:

  • Added Tutorial Mode, teaching the basics on a smaller sized grid
  • Extended help with instruction summary
  • Streamlined switching between Edit and Run modes

Last comments

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Jicehel
2 years ago

Yes, another hard but great game from Eriban.
I like that all his games are very differents

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eriban
2 years ago

More than three year’s after its initial release I thought it was time to properly finish this creation. Since the last release I found even longer running programs, which typically require significant amount of data storage. Running these on the Gamebuino is a challenge, as RAM is limited. I refactored the program to use as little memory as possible. With that I managed to extend the data storage to 7000 cells. This data storage now takes more than 40% of the Gamebuino’s RAM, which is five times more than the display memory. With these changes it can now execute all long-running 7x7 programs that I’ve found, including one that takes more than 33 million steps to complete.

However, I also added some fun new challenges. Towards the end they become more open ended. Should anyone manage to complete them all, please let me know. I am especially curious about your solutions to Challenges 18 and 19.

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2 years ago

Thank you for this nice update.

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