World of Gates by Mibi88
This games gets you started with making circuits with logic gates.
Please note that I don't know much about logic circuits myself, I don't know much more than what I read on the Wikipedia page about logic gates and I played a bit around with them and logisim, so I may have done some things a bit weirdly.
~~A web and a windows build are coming soon.~~
The Web and Windows builds are here!
The gates
The AND gate
The OR gate (at least one of its inputs must be 1 for its output to be 1)
The XOR gate (its output is true if its inputs are different)
The buffer. It does nothing. However, you can turn it into a NOT:
Then it becomes useful as it inverts the signal!
(You can invert all the other gates' output as well)
How to play
NOTE: If you disconnected a wire to move it, start dragging the end you want to move directly after having switched to edit mode, or the wire will reconnect.
Shortcuts
Enter: Add a gate at the cursor's position.
Delete: Delete the selected object.
D: Disconnect the selected element. Disconnects both ends of the wire if a wire is selected.
Old instructions
Click to add gates, when you selected the "+" tool. If you click on a placed gate again (while having this tool active, you can negate it). Right-click to add wires.
Click on objects to move them with the pen tool.
The "<-->" tool allows you to disconnect elements. Note that you should directly click and move the wire's end/start to move it when going in pen mode afterwards or the wire will directly reconnect with the gate/the wire/the input/the output it was connected to before. You can also disconnect the selected item in pen mode by pressing "D" (note that it disconnects both ends of a wire, if a wire is selected).
The trash can tool allows you to delete things by clicking on them.
Press on the button with the arrow, the run button to watch the circuit in action. click on the digits in front of the labels under it to change the input.
Once you accomplished the assignment in written blue, click on the "ok" button, with the little tick. if your circuits fulfills the assignment, you can then go to the next level.
~~I will add some images soon to make it clearer.~~
I finally did it.
HAVE FUN!
Known (unfixed) bugs
- Disconnecting a wire connected to an output block seems broken.
Timelapse
https://youtu.be/WnbyzCf6F8Q
| Link | https://github.com/mibi88/ld59 |
| Link | https://mibi88.itch.io/world-of-gates |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/world-of-gates |
Ratings
| Overall | 706th | 3.119⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 755th | 2.69⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 408th | 3.409⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 128th | 4.227⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 702th | 2.977⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 658th | 1.824⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 811th | 2.5⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 15🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
Yes it's quite counter-intuitive. I also shouldn't have made the gates take a single grid cell.
I should make proper instructions on how to play, it would already help a little.
> I love the look, and great platform for logic circuitry puzzles!
Thanks!
> A couple things were a little finicky like the level logic with ending the level.
Maybe there is a bug. Could you detail it a little more? I know I designed editing a bit weirdly, and it is maybe not so intuitive, but I hadn't found any bug there.
> Very enjoyable, but i’m a little confuse about the gates
I'll add truth tables to the game's description.
> And also, i wasn’t able to figure if i was in big or little indian x)
You're never working with bytes in any of the levels, so I don't really see what you mean. Do you mean the most significant and the least significant bit? BIT 0 is the least significant bit and BIT 1 is the most significant bit in the carry adder level. I should've indicated that clearly.
> Sadly my mouse is old and it cannot hold the right click, so it was nearly impossible to connect the gates
That's unfortunate. I didn't add any shortcut to do it with the keyboard… It requires both mouse buttons to work unfortunately.
> I couldn’t connect the already unconnected wires
Did you draw the wires in the correct direction? I should've drawn an arrow to indicate it clearly…
To all of you, thanks for your feedback!
> I realy hate to say it but the UX brings down the entire rest of the game down. UX aside I like the game.
> I figured out the UI after some playing around but adding tooltips to each icon and in game instructions would’ve made it easier to get started.
Yes I did a pretty bad job at making an intuitive UI. I hope I'll do that better next time! If I'm making a UI again, I'll think about tooltips.
First of all, super impressed you managed to pull this off. I feel like building this whole system is way more complex than most jam games, especially if you'd never learned about it before, so kudos to you! I really like the simple graphics too, and had a lot of fun puzzling out all these principles from logic gates that I haven't had to think about in a while.
That being said, it definitely could've been a smoother experience - I'm not sure the issue with the UI was that it wasn't "intuitive" as much as it was really finnicky to work with. Connecting wires together, especially when they were overlapping, splitting, or going backwards, was very very hard to do, even when I was both clear on what I was trying to do and how I was supposed to do it. Connecting them to the gates with 2 inputs was also extremely hard in my experience. It felt like a brute force process a lot of the time and honestly, I probably spent 10x more time (or more) trying to get the wires to connect properly than I did trying to figure out the puzzles.
BUT, it did feel like it got a bit more manageable when I switched from web to Windows, which is maybe something worth playing with. It might've just been that I got more used to the way it all works, but I actually did just feel like everything was less finnicky in the downloaded version.
But beyond that, you really did an amazing job here. The UI/UX stuff does hold the experience back, but if I look beyond that, this is a genuine accomplishment that works surprisingly well, and you have a lot to be proud of. Fantastic work!
> especially if you’d never learned about it before
I knew them already, but I (still) don't know much about circuit design. I think the most I'd done before was a 4 bit carry adder in Logisim.
So… if someone that is knowledgeable on this topic plays my game, I don't really know what he would think of it :laughing:.
> BUT, it did feel like it got a bit more manageable when I switched from web to Windows, which is maybe something worth playing with. It might’ve just been that I got more used to the way it all works, but I actually did just feel like everything was less finnicky in the downloaded version.
The web version has some quirks, indeed, but AFAIK only the shortcuts are broken.
> Connecting them to the gates with 2 inputs was also extremely hard in my experience. It felt like a brute force process a lot of the time and honestly, I probably spent 10x more time (or more) trying to get the wires to connect properly than I did trying to figure out the puzzles.
I made a quite bad decision to lay all the components down in a grid, where the gates only take one grid cell. Wire selection also relies on this coarse grid, which makes things quite imprecise.
> you have a lot to be proud of
Yes I'm very proud of it, I didn't think that I would get it done at first.
Maybe you could add some explanations of the symbols in the game interface? I found myself constantly checking what each symbol means.:D
With some better UX and a little audio I could see myself playing this for quite a while!
> With some better UX and a little audio I could see myself playing this for quite a while!
Yes the UX really holds it back.
Thanks also for reporting this bug!
I've tried reproducing the bug, but I was unable to get this result:
I need to investigate this issue a bit more. Which version are you using? Could you maybe detail how you got this result?
If you experience a bug like this again, you can exit the game with the  button. Then, select the level and it should be empty again, except if you already validated it. If you already validated it, your working circuit will be loaded again.
Last time I put a split in the wire like you have in your image but that didn't work for me, so now I tried without split (just directly connecting to UINT 1) but that doesn't work for me either.
Could you maybe send a small screen recording of the bug in action? I haven't been able to reproduce this bug so far.
Thank you a lot for helping me to find out what was happening!