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About This Game

🎨 What Is This?

A circuit simulator where you draw everything. NANDs and pixels. Build gates, ALUs, CPUs — whatever you want. Watch signals flow, rewind time, optimize your layout. Circuits are just images.

More Technical Details

⚡ Simulation Engine 

The simulation engine uses a variable-delay event-driven simulation that takes into account the topology of the wires to create a distance/propagation delay map based on Elmore delay calculation for trees. It also considers fanout — the higher the fanout, the higher the delay. Trees propagate differently than "lines," creating a more accurate simulation so players can develop intuition for real circuit design (sort of).

👁️ Visualization of Wire Propagation

The distances are mapped to pixels so players can visualize wires "propagating" with a glow effect, which helps understand how things work. Rendering is done in real time with shaders. The game is designed with a white-box philosophy — players have full visibility of every state of every wire and its propagation. You can also interact with it.

⏪ Simulation Rewind

The delta-based design of the simulation allows it to be paused and controlled back and forth. For example, if something goes too fast, or you're not sure what happened, just right-click and move the mouse back and forth to replay it seamlessly. Particularly useful for debugging cyclic circuits.

📑 Layers

A chip-simulation game wouldn't be complete without layer support, right? Players can add layers like in Photoshop (up to 3 layers), and wires can connect with neighboring layers, although NANDs are only allowed on the bottom layer. Wires on upper layers have higher propagation speed.

🎮 Beginner-Friendly Campaign (in development) 

The game has a low-pace campaign so new users can solve problems little by little and learn concepts gradually, testing and refining solutions while tracking progress. It's still in its early days, but more content will be added later.

📦 Blueprints 

There's an inventory-like UI for placing blueprints so players can build their library and reuse components, adding a new progression dimension to the game.

🔊 ASMR 

Circuits make sounds based on NAND activations — they beep faster when busy and slower when idle. Another tool for developing intuition about efficiency, and it's cool.

💀 Ticks Are Earned, Not Given 

The simulation is not immediate, so players can build their own clocks in sandbox mode by exploring the delay mechanism. Clocked/synchronous components won't work for free — you need to make them efficient, adding an extra challenge to the game.

🔋 Power Calculation (experimental) 

There's a simplified energy calculation formula to explore circuit energy efficiency vs speed (still not fully developed). This rewards efficient circuits — for example, those that save activations by disabling unused components.

🛠️ Open Source

Written in C with Raylib. Source code on GitHub — fork it, break it, learn from it.

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