eevee

a cool tile-based puzzle game that happens to 99% emulate CHIP'S CHALLENGE® 1 and 2!

this is the thing that i'm still most pleased with. i just sort of retreated into a cave for half a year and cranked this out. i don't really know why but i hope people play and enjoy it so i can feel like the time was well-spent

• has 800+ community levels built in, including

  • 200 designed for CC2, that sequel you never played
  • CCLP1, a CC1 set specifically intended as a gentler substitute for the original game
  • plus, a set of tutorial levels i made and never finished! oops

• if you've got the original games, you can load the stock levels too! (and CC1 is free on steam, plus it understands the original microsoft chips.dat format!) or load any of the other of thousands of levels made over the years

• rewind and undo! because fat-fingering sokoban is devastating

• skip levels whenever you want! i'm not your mom

• play on a phone! it usually works!

• built-in level editor! share your levels to anyone with just a link. includes support for a bunch of completely new experimental tiles that i made up, against my better judgment!

• completely new art, sounds, and music... but compatible with other tilesets too

• fixes for some subtle wonky behavior, but fine-grained compat settings if you want them. currently most compatible with steam rules, but there's some work on lynx and even mscc (though that's a long shot tbh)

• secret dev tools with demo playback, outright cheating, and more

• it's completely vanilla javascript with no react or typescript or other preprocessor junk. not even minified. feel free to peruse the source code or just use your browser's dev tools

about the tiles

someone on fedi commented yesterday about being briefly confused by some of the tile changes, and it made me want to touch on them a bit

i did take a few creative liberties with the sprites, for a variety of reasons. i think there are three general categories of things i changed

color vision accessibility

the original chip's challenge has four kinds of buttons: brown, blue, green, and red. these are distinguished only by color in the original atari lynx game, the 90s microsoft port everyone remembers, and the more faithful steam releases. similarly, there are four kinds of keys/doors, but these are somewhat worse — two of the colors are bright yellow and bright green, which i specifically know to look very similar with the most common form of color deficiency.

chip's challenge 2 makes this worse. there are tons of tiles that are identical except for color. (this isn't for tileset efficiency or anything; they exist as distinct sprites on the game's own tile sheet.) even the ones that are different enough to distinguish with poor color vision still make the game kind of visually homogeneous, and sometimes just completely incomprehensible. i believe a full list is:

• EIGHT different colors of button
• four colors of doors + keys
• four colors of teleporter, again including both bright green and bright yellow
• the red item thief vs the blue key thief (made extra annoying because cc1 only had the item thief, and mscc's item thief was blue, not red)
• red teeth and blue timid teeth (these do animate somewhat differently, but i don't think they really make sense — the idea of "timid teeth" is that they run away from chip, but if you're playing as melinda then the behavior is reversed so it makes no sense for the blue ones to always act scared)
• blue and yellow tanks
• green and purple toggle walls
• blue and green fake walls, which themselves are both recolors of regular walls
• dirt blocks and ice blocks

cc2 is a complicated game, and i don't think this approach to the visual style is helping. so i came up with this:

• the buttons all got glyphs that, i hope, at least suggest what they do. you probably can't guess if you've never played the game, but once you have, they should be pretty solid reminders. (they are, in the order shown: blue to reverse direction of all blue tanks; green to swap toggle walls/floors and green chips/bombs; red for clone machines; brown to close traps; pink to send a pulse through wires; black to NOT send a pulse through wires; orange to toggle a flame jet; and gray to affect a bunch of kinds of tiles in a 5×5 square around it.)

  incidentally, LL also has tiles for depressed versions of each of these buttons, which i think adds a lot.

• the keys and doors all have shapes as well as colors. unfortunately every key also has a subtle special behavior, but i could not figure out how to encode those visually.

• the thieves, besides being little raccoons guys, also have symbols indicating the kind of thing they steal.

• the toggle floors still aren't great, but i think the starker gradient on the purple version conveys "current" better.

• the teeth have become two distinct variants of the same critter.

• the teleporters animate in a way that at least somewhat suggests what's different between them. red teleporters search forwards while blue ones search backwards. yellow ones can be picked up, so they don't have the bolts in the corners. green ones choose their destination randomly.

• blue fake walls (which become either normal floor or wall when bumped) have a shaded dubious appearance, whereas green popdown walls (may be solid, or temporarily press down while stepped on) could be either a folding contraption or an ornate wall.

• green bombs and chips (which become the other when a green button is pressed) have the same half-and-half design as the green button itself.

• dirt blocks and ice blocks look completely different.

• the tanks do look the same, but i couldn't think of anything that would really distinguish them. the colors are very different anyway, and they behave so radically differently that they'd be hard to mix up.

theming

i tried very hard not to simply make Haha It's Chip's Challenge But Not Lol, even though it is an emulator, so some of the theming is different. obviously (?) there is heavy fox flux inspiration here — you play as lexy, and you're collecting hearts instead of chips. the cc2 bonus flags also become bonus candies. and there's the raccoons which ended up kind of funny since the only raccoon species in flora so far doesn't have a mouth.

beyond that, the main distinction is with the creatures. this was a little tricky because i did want to keep them identifiable, but also, the identity of some of them had completely diverged between "real" cc and mscc which kinda did whatever it wanted. here's what i mean; this is LL, steam, and mscc. (note that a few of these are cc2 critters and their mscc-style sprites were created later by a different artist.)

• obviously, chip and melinda have become lexy and cerise

• the mscc tanks always looked like joysticks to me, but of course they're intended as cannons. but why? the tanks never fire. their big thing is moving. so my tanks have no guns, and instead feature a conspicuous antenna.

  actually, i realize now that the line on the upper left on the mscc tanks is probably meant as an antenna! i always thought it was shading.

• the bugs presented somewhat of a challenge. in cc2, there's the oddly spindly "ant" and the "centipede", which have opposite behavior but are both just... bugs. in mscc, these were the very ambiguous "bug" and the alarmingly large "paramecium".

  nothing about either actually suggests which way they move, unfortunately (except that they follow walls, which seems like very bug-like behavior), and i didn't really improve on that. but i tried to compromise between the designs, giving me a beetle reminiscent of mscc's bug, and a caterpillar which i thought was a fairly clever middle ground between a centipede and a massive paramecium. they also have opposite color schemes, cool vs warm.

• mscc's glider always looked like it was just a big flipper, whereas cc2 makes clear that it's... some kind of... tech ship. seen from other angles you can even see jets at the back. i didn't really know what to do with this but ended up with a little flying ship guy. the most notable feature of the glider is that it survives in water, so mine has wings. thankfully it's completely original and bears no resemblance to anything

• mscc has a fireball. cc2 has a fire box. i don't know what a fire box is. fireball it is

• the blobs obviously had to become the little smiling fox flux slimes, which were great fun to draw and animate from this angle. i hope i get to use them again sometime

• walkers are so weird. cc2 actually gives them (and blobs, for that matter) double-size animations, where they stretch over to the next tile and then pull themselves along afterwards. i don't really like that since it feels misleading about where you can actually step; as soon as a monster has started to leave a tile, you're free to move into it.

  i also had fond memories of the mscc walker sprite. they're... well, a ball with a stick through it. i don't know what that's supposed to be, but it always reminded me of a molecule, which also matches the walker's behavior of bumping off of things in random directions. so i made a big molecule.

• the cc2 teeth are a joke. the mscc teeth gave me nightmares. i don't know what they're supposed to be exactly, but i tried to capture their essence in a little dinosaur kinda critter, something that i wanted to feel like you definitely did not want chasing you. (you can see it from the side above.)

• the ghost became harmonitor. not sure how that happened

• the purple ball is still a purple ball. i can't think of anything more appropriate for "bounces back and forth" than a rubber ball, and obviously it should be purple.

• the rover, similarly, is so specific and bizarre (it regularly rotates between emulating the behavior of every other creature, with a different animation for each) that i don't know where else to go with it. but i did make it look less like a UFO and more like a deadly roomba, which i think is more fitting.

• the floor mimic (which normally looks like a regular floor tile) is pretty specific, but i gave mine a hint of an identity, a little critter hiding underneath.

cc2 wackiness

cc2 adds a lot of tiles, and some of them are prone for confusion, i think. i tried to reduce this, even at the cost of some confusion when comparing the tilesets.

• cc1 had bombs, which were... big red cartoon bombs that just sat around and exploded if anything stepped on them. ok, fine.

  cc2 then added dynamite, an item you can pick up and drop that will then detonate after some time. but the obvious name for such a contraption is a "time bomb". but there is already a bomb. and now this raises the question of why a bomb would explode when touched.

  i opted to turn the bombs into mines, in the sense of the big sea mines from minesweeper. everyone understands what those do. that let me turn the dynamite into a big red cartoon bomb, which has the added bonus that i could make the timer absolutely gigantic (whereas in cc2 it's like three pixels tall). so now the "red bomb" is a different thing depending on how you're playing. sorry!

• cc2 has the "bribe", which lets you pass a thief without losing anything else (though the bribe itself is consumed). it looks like a big pile of treasure. i think that's kind of weird. like, if i see a big pile of treasure in a video game, it's obviously for me, right?

  anyway i rendered it as a cartoon money bag, which seems more the kind of thing a robber might take away

• cc2 has the "secret eye" to show you some kinds of hidden tiles, and it is literally just an eyeball. i have rendered this as x-ray specs.

• cc2 has the "lightning bolt" which makes it so standing on top of wires automatically powers them. i don't understand why this isn't just a type of boot, since it's about your contact with the floor. i made it a boot

• also my flippers are a mermaid tail instead, but i think that's more because i drew a bunch of digitigrade-style boots first and then could not figure out how to make digitigrade flippers look reasonable. but then cerise doesn't have digitigrade feet anyway so i don't know

experimental tiles

oh yeah so i just threw a bunch of stuff at the wall to see what would stick. barely any "real" levels have been made with these (although i vaguely intended to add them to my lesson pack eventually), so, feel free to play with them if you want

• the circuit block, which can contain wires, and acts like it's that set of wires, including connecting to neighbors. as a block, it can be pushed around, so it can change circuits! if it falls into water it becomes wired floor. i suspect this is still buggy as hell but you could do some buck wild stuff with it

• the gift bow, which lets you make an item that anything can pick up, including monsters. (this was already possible using cc2 bugs, so i just made it legitimate.) use cases are somewhat limited since, for example, most monsters can't open doors even if they have the key.

• the skeleton key, a tool (not a key) which can open any color of door once.

• gates, which are like doors but they can be placed atop other kinds of terrain (vs doors which count as terrain themselves), and which all monsters can open.

• sand, which causes everything to move at half speed, and which blocks cannot be pushed onto at all.

• the dash floor, which causes everything to move at double speed.

• spikes, which stop (both!) players, unless they have the hiking boots (which were previously useless for lexy). everything else can pass

• the cracked ice, which breaks and becomes water when something steps off of it (except for ghosts and cerise).

• the hole, which destroys absolutely everything except for ghosts. distinct from mines because holes never go away, whereas mines are single-use.

• the *cracked floor, which becomes a hole when something steps off of it (except ghosts and cerise).

• the turntable, which rotates anything that steps on it by a quarter turn (and then pushes it off in that direction). this adds a genuinely new way to affect monster pathing, plus it can be used to rotate frame blocks.

• the blue teleporter exit, which is like a blue teleporter but it can only be arrived at, not re-entered.

• the electrified floor, which, when powered, will destroy anything that steps on it, unless they're wearing the lightning boots. dirt blocks are immune. it also conducts power itself, like a four-way wire, which doesn't otherwise exist.

• the ankh, a truly bizarre item — dropping it on empty floor will inscribe a rune there, and when a player dies, they will resurrect at that spot (as long as nothing else is in the way). you can only have one rune at a time, and it only works once.

• the 5× bonus candy, which quintuples the player's bonus points.

• the boulder, which rolls when pushed until it hits something else. if it hits another boulder, it will transfer its momentum and set that one rolling. if it falls in water, it turns to gravel.

• the glass block, which can be pushed over one item or key to pick it up, and which will drop that item when destroyed. most notably, a loaded glass block can be pushed onto an empty clone machine and used to clone items.

• the diode, which acts as a one-frame delay gate, but also ensures current only flows in one direction. (this is possible in cc2 using an OR gate with one input, but it's awkward and ugly.)

• the sokoban blocks, buttons, and walls, which come in four colors. while every button of a certain color is pressed, all corresponding walls become floor. a button can be held down by any normal block or a sokoban block of its matching color, but not a block of a different color. the blocks also turn to colored floor in water, and cannot be pushed across colored floors of a different color.

• the one-way wall, which acts like a thin wall (i.e. can be placed freely along any tile edge), but it doesn't block movement into the tile, only out of it.

feel free to link me to any horrendous contraptions you build with these.