| 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, and please report any bugs using the "Ticket" system on the web page.
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:
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.)
28 Nov 2009 WHD Bug report deleted; bug has been fixed.
28 Nov 2009 JM Will, the ctrl R binding was also been bind to plain 'R' so now, you cannot enter the 'run' command on the text editor
WHD Very odd. I'm not seeing that on either OS X or Linux. At a guess, the <Command-r> binding is doing the wrong thing on Win XP, so I've arranged for it to be done only on OS X. Download it again and give it a try, if you would.
JM Thanks, it is OK now, the keyboard shortcut was just nice to have, maybe you can try that later...
WHD Oh, the Ctrl+R binding should still be there. I wanted it to be <Control-r> on Linux and Windows, and <Command-r> on OS X; and I got lazy, and just did both bindings on every platform. Apparently on Windows, a binding to <Command-r> gets interpreted as a binding on <r>. So Ctrl+R should work.
JM you are right, Ctrl+R works just fine. btw, I think a good challenge for the last (for now) stage is to reach the goal with no damages to robbie (-:
28 Nov 2009
NEM I cannot download the archive: Mac unzip claims it is corrupted (tried 3 times now).
WHD You're right, it does. The .zip file is produced by Fossil, automatically; I'll take it up with the Fossil guys. However, using the "unzip" command from the Terminal window works just fine; at least, it did for me.