This is my final comment on the game and a lottt of progress have been made!!!!
The game now contains a lot of things unfoldable, and as classified earlier this is an emergent game hence whatever decisions you take is too randomised and youve to CAREFULLY place your bets on placing food for ant, you must be pretty familiar with Langton's Ant by now if not check the first reply of this thread.
Since my last check-in, I’ve... made a lot of changes.
- Added a whole set of training since learning brainfuck is as bad as it sounds, literally lol! It will still take so i recommend going through guide and this quick and easy lookbook
- The game has HELP button which you MUST check out before doing anything because it's better to understand before just diving in or maybe you can.
- After training which is 3 levels only out of which two mazes are 5x5 and third one is 7x7, PLEASE LOOK THE BOTTOM PANEL (EDITOR) TO UNDERSTAND BEFORE EDITING and yeah before pressing space edit your brainf### code to understand.
Well you may ask, how did I implement so
- i coded a real Brainfuck interpreter, re-run from scratch on every ant step. Each step calls it once with exactly 3 inputs (nearby, foodDirection, randomDirection) and reads back one output, which becomes the ant's extra turn (0–3). The reason why youve more chances to fail if your food is closer to edges.
- The tape is 5 cells with a hard-clamped pointer, so >/< can never walk off the end, and cells hold arbitrary integers rather than wrapping at 255. Output is normalized modulo 4 the only consumer is the ant, which can turn 0–3 quarter-turns, so a raw value like 7 would be meaningless as a rotation. Brackets are pre-compiled once into a jump table by loadInstinct() instead of being re-parsed each run, which matters because it executes 200× per level on a live-editable program. Two safety rails protect player-written code: a 9,999-iteration cap so [+] kills the turn instead of freezing the tab, and the editor refuses unbalanced brackets (striking them through), so the jump table is never missing an entry. Pretty much a beginner with this language so i did take Opus 4.8's assistance in case you wonder, but it was mainly for writing javascript implementation of the logic i had :D
After all the core engine for game.js was made i had to make sure about the UI, the sound and gridding and canvas for viewport.
- Used MSDOS font for fonting and yellow for HELP, purple for TRAINING, red for final IN GAME mode, these are the legends. The sizing is 24px uniformly.
- The sound engine uses the Web Audio API to generate simple square-wave sounds without external audio files. Beep(), Fail () and Chime () provide step, loss, and victory sounds respectively. Audio starts only after user interaction, keeping the browser's autoplay restrictions happy.
- The help is totally opaque which had to take a lot of time and it's all present in ui.js (I m later going to link the files for reference, the gh link).
- Rest you can figure out and have fun playing around and check the repo and tweak at your end, dont forget to credit me.
The file is 36KB and original file when you locally set it up withe everything is 90KB, so it's really small (and i feel that as a victory) and i did try obfuscating eventually and golfing my code just so that it looks more neater and there is lesser room for slopped over engineered illogical implementations!
I REALLY HOPE Y'ALL love my idea for this and i m totally free for any amendments for future too as i m going to keep optimising the bytes of this codebase and other stuff to toss around in multiple jams. I had really fun experience building it! :D and i hope the creator likes it too.
This is my final iteration to this! Until next time...PLEASE ADD ANY COMMENTS, I'D APPRECIATE ALL SORTS OF FEEDBACK SINCE IVE NEVER BEEN PART OF ANY JAM OFFICIALLY .....:3
- FINAL GAME: https://kirbx01.itch.io/tracefuh
- GH LINK : https://github.com/kirbx01/tracef-