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Chip's Tribute 
A recreation of the 90's classic "Chip's Challenge" written entirely in JavaScript for the HTML5 Canvas.
Chip's Challenge was designed by developer Chuck Somerville and released for the Atari Lynx in 1989 by Epyx Games. It was later ported to the Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and... a whole lot of platforms, honestly - including a release for Windows 95. That's the version I'm trying to remake.
It's a fairly simple game - move around and push blocks, pick up items, and cry while terrifying frog-beasts chase you across the map. But the game manages to twist these simple mechanics into some truly devious and downright frustrating puzzles, not to mention that several level packs have been created by fans over the years. Surprisingly enough, there is still an active community for this game today!
The folks over at the Chip's Challenge Wiki can explain the game better than I can. You can also check out the original games on Steam: Chip's Challenge 1, Chip's Challenge 2 (finally released in 2015!), and Chuck's modern take on the original - Chuck's Challenge 3D. They're all very affordable and very good!
Even if you somehow obtain a copy of the Windows version of the game today (which you won't be able to do legally), you won't be able to simply run it on any modern machine. The original game was ported to Windows as a 16-bit application, and there's no way to make 16-bit applications run natively on 64-bit operating systems. You'll need to own a rather old machine or boot up a 32-bit Windows VM.
So in the interest of preserving this iconic piece of 90's history, I want to make it available in a format that current players can enjoy. Also, I've never made a video game before, so this seems like a good learning opportunity.
The code for this game will be entirely written from scratch using as few libraries as possible. I plan to implement a level editor and leaderboards as well - but those will wait until the game is at least feature-complete. After that, I might use the custom engine as a jumping off point to create a brand new game! We'll see how this goes.
Last but not least, this project is being done entirely for free and will never cost anyone anything! This is just a learning project for me, and I hope that fans both old and new can enjoy playing it as much as I enjoy making it.
For the time being, additional questions about this project can be addressed to runeberrysoftware@gmail.com
Beta
The beta phase will begin once the game is feature-complete (compared to MS-CC1). This will focus on creating a level editor, creating real levels, and enhancing the game for web browser and mobile play.
Alpha
The alpha phase of development will focus on getting all MS-CC1 features into the game and making sure the game controls accurately and, in general, adheres to the Microsoft Ruleset.
- 0.3.7 - Bugfix - Loading screen will now render properly, but you may never see it if your connection is fast enough!
- 0.3.6 - Bugfix - "unload" collision will now only fire if "barrier"/"locking" collision are not detected
- 0.3.5 - Moved decrementTime to the onBeforeExecute event to resolve a bug with time not updating.
- 0.3.4 - Force floors are hard, refactoring in the meantime. Added events to the CommandQueue object and cleaned up the main loop.
- 0.3.3 - ICE TILES ARE WORKING! The timing is a little off, but the logic is there. Next release: force floors.
- 0.3.2 - Coding changes. Ice still doesn't work, but the "command" system has been rewritten to hopefully accomodate this effort. I wanted to push a new version since I finally got the game in a working state again.
- Fun little side feature: the game now remembers the last level you played (via cookie) and automatically starts you there when the game loads.
- 0.3.1 - The last build broke block collision, but that is now fixed. I am sure this has broken something else as a result.
- There was no hotfix for block collision due to various changes, so collision has been significantly rewritten (something I wanted to do anyway). A Player object, Monster objects, etc. It's cleaner now, supposedly.
- Tanks now better emulate their original behavior on a blue switch press (but they still need some tweaking)
- Sliding - still not implemented. Next build, maybe?
- 0.3.0 - Chip's most sentient foes, the Teeth and Tank, are now alive! They're squatting in the freshly-painted Level 5. And with that, all monsters are now in the game! In other news:
- Actually a CC2 feature: the Red Thief is now available in Level 2. In this edition, the red thief will politely ask for all the keys you are carrying, but will leave your boots alone.
- The tileset was rearranged a little bit, do a hard-refresh in your browser to make sure you're getting the latest one.
- Several objects were moved out of chips.util.js and into chips.obj.js. This file follows more closely a Module-style architecture, which I would like to implement across the app.
- 0.2.2 - 2 new monsters, the Blob and the Walker, can now be observed in Level 10!
- 0.2.1 - Monsters have appeared! You can see the Glider, Fireball, Bug, and Paramecium in action on Level 9, or the Ball on Level 3. In addition...
- You can now hold down the arrow keys to move continuously. Practice "marching" with the bugs in Level 9 to see how the timing pairs up.
- Pausing! You can now pause your game with SHIFT-C or the Pause button the control panel. Also, the game will automatically pause when you lose focus on the game's page (much like the original), but you must manually unpause.
- 0.2.0 - No feature changes, but a MAJOR code overhaul. App rearchitected for improved modularity.
- No more global functions/vars! Everything is neatly organized within the chips namespace.
- Levels are now grouped into Levelsets, which are stored on the server as JSON files (Only one exists now: Test.json)
- Tile and collision are now packed up into a neatly-organized object - no more deplorable switch statements! Would like to export rulesets as JSON in a future release.
- An actual loading screen! It's not much, but at least the game will now reliably wait for all assets to load before trying to draw.
- 0.1.0 - First commit