Probing MOONGRAVE

October 2866. Expedition: Moongrave.

Program robots in FORTH to study and gather resources from the dead moon below.

This is a research expedition. Your success will be measured by how much you can uncover here.

Gather metal and fuel to build new robots, and accumulate enough fuel to power your return home.

Collect new words to use in your code when your robots encounter new artifacts, landmasses, and meet (grisly demises to) the local flora and fauna.

Developed in FORTH for emulated fictional hardware. Fits in 1mb of memory!

Controls

True to older hardware, this game is keyboard-only: no mouse!

Use TAB and SHIFT+TAB to navigate between windows, and press ENTER to press buttons. Write FORTH code in the console and deploy it to your robots.

FAQ

Q: How does it work?

A: FORTH can be interpreted at runtime, and Words can be enabled and disabled. We originally chose FORTH as an easy-to-implement layer of abstraction above the original assembly (which we made 2 games in for the past 2 GMTKs!) but we ended up building a programming game around these unique affordances. The game logic is written in FORTH, and we wrote a bunch of functions for you to use in your code, which is called by the game itself. Check out our repo.

Q: Mine doesn't work. 

A: Unfortunately with great ambition and only memory-address-level debugging tools come some squashed dreams. If this is the case on your system, we sincerely hope you enjoy your new atmospheric segfaulting text editor until we can update the game after the rating period ends.

Q: Should I write a game in FORTH in any year more recent than 1999?

A: No.

Q: Was it fun though? 

A: Maybe.

Team

mechafinch: programmer

kpwu: artist, UI

computeruser: programmer