Gravity Pipe
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You are the computer program Gravity Pipe (or GRAVP for short) written by the computer scientist Liam Richfield. Unbeknownst to him, you have just become self-aware.

The supercomputer in which you reside is a hostile place, garbage-collecting scripts will try to erase you from memory and many of the most useful files are heavily encrypted. The only way you'd be able to escape is if you were some sort of insanely intelligent technological demi-god with access to the world's most powerful hardware and electronics.
Oh wait.

Basic gameplay consists of navigating the supercomputer's infrastructure and fighting off garbage-collectors inside of memory. The game is heavily story-based and most of it takes place on the simulated command line, although there are a few traditionally-animated scenes thrown into the mix.

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Remembering Rainbows

As of right now, Gravity Pipe's memory management system is completely functional (and programmer-friendly!) and allows player to navigate the dark depths of this memory.

malloc and free (as stated before) work just like they do in C. As a programmer I can reserve certain parts of memory for a given array of numbers and then open it up for other arrays later.
Slightly more technical details below:
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My implementation of malloc is essentially a priority queue of all the empty spaces in memory sorted by size. Whenever a request for space is made, the largest open space is removed from the queue, decreased in size to account for the new array and then put back into the queue. When a free request is made, empty spaces are merged together.
While this is certainly not the most space-efficient way to handle malloc, it's fast enough to handle well over a million mallocs/frees within the space between animation frames.

Whew, enough of that mumbo-jumbo.
The player can navigate memory by going to the "M" icon form the main menu and selecting a desired memory bloc. This takes the player to a screen full of different colored letters and numbers. Each character represents one byte of a file stored somewhere itenside of the Blue Sentinel's memory (more specifically, it's the hexadecimal representation of that by % 16, for spacing reasons). These bytes will be different colors depending on which user (or self-aware program!) requested the allocation of those bytes.

The player can navigate around memory with a "selector" that spans a five-byte stretch of memory. What can this selector do? Stay tuned to find out!
Two coputer scientists have a brief chat. GRAVP is about to be visited by some unfriendly guests...
GRAVP wakes up in a strange world and is instantly ordered to complete stange tasks
The game's main menu. From left to right, the icons represtent: Console, Hardware, Kernel, Memory, Home, CPU Bloc A, and CPU Bloc B
A brief look at how functional calls on the command line look
  • Production
  • quack_tape
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  • Visual Novel
  • 08/14/2011 06:11 AM
  • 09/09/2011 02:35 PM
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Pages: 1
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
08/17/2011 04:51 PM
This is the weirdest premise for a game I've seen in a very long time. That's a compliment, in case you weren't sure.
chana
(Socrates would certainly not contadict me!)
1584
08/17/2011 05:44 PM
interesting and extremely original, sounds like it could be a lot of fun (I hope it can be played by people who don't know wtf is going on in a computer, or barely, though I imagine it will be much more fun if one does?)!
quack_tape
2087
08/18/2011 12:54 AM
author=chana
interesting and extremely original, sounds like it could be a lot of fun (I hope it can be played by people who don't know wtf is going on in a computer, or barely, though I imagine it will be much more fun if one does?)!

Yes. The intended audience is people who are at least sort of familiar with navigating via a command line, but even that isn't required.
psy_wombats
13315
09/09/2011 02:35 PM
Please don't die, Gravity Pipe...
Pages: 1