Version 25 of Robbie the Robot

Updated 2009-11-28 15:47:00 by WHD
What: Robbie the Robot
Intro: http://wjduquette.com/projects/robbie.cgi/
Description: A puzzle game intended to teach simple programming skills.
Updated: 27 nov 2009
Contact: mailto:[email protected] (Will Duquette)

Robbie the Robot is a puzzle game intended to teach simple programming skills. The goal is to move a robot through a series of rooms; in the player must write a short script to move the robot from the starting point to a finish point. There are puzzles to solve along the way: the robot must trigger switches in a particular order, or maneuver around obstacles, or manipulate other robots into triggering switches, etc.

See the web page, above, for the latest news.


27 nov 2009

JM which is the file to download?

WHD At present you need to download the source, and run it with ActiveTcl. I've added information on where to download the source to the web page given above. Eventually, I intend to have downloadable executables for OSX, Linux, and Windows.


27 nov 2009

JM This is great!

My 14 year old son like it. This is very creative and I enjoy seen Tcl in action. I have some feedback for you to consider:

  • - In the tutorial, clear the editor from the previous exercise
  • - Have a keyboard shortcut for the "Run" button, F5 ?

Congratulations!

WHD I find that having the script persist is a good thing; it's fun to see what Robbie does with the previous room's script. However, Command-A or Ctrl-Shift-A will select the entire script, so you can delete it easily. And just this evening, I added a keyboard shortcut for the "Run" button (the game is by no means finished).

If you invoke it with the "-edit" flag, you can access a fairly primitive room editor, and add new rooms. I've not documented the room definition commands, yet, but you can get a good idea of what they are like from the existing rooms. When you "Save" in the room editor, it writes the current set of rooms to rooms.tcl in the source tree. (One of the next things to do is allow multiple room sets. The tutorial will be a separate set from the main game, and then users will be able to write their own.)