Mohammad Ali Undergraduate Dissertation 2016/17

Building a video game in Logisim

Supervised by D.Sudholt

Abstract

The overarching aim of this project was to develop a playable video game inside of the Logisim digital circuit simulator. This video game could be played, analysed and edited by future students; creating a unique and hopefully fun learning tool.

The game chosen was Helicopter - a flash game available online, where the key objective is to apply thrust to a helicopter in order to avoid obstacles on a side-scrolling map. It was successfully designed from its very onset which included drawing the game interface, programming the game-play and displaying an overall game score. The components of the game circuit can be analysed within Logisim and there are several improvements which could be added to the overall game by future students.

Whilst initial intuition and research had suggested that a CPU would need to be designed to run the game code - the specification was fully addressed using only logic components to represent entities in the game with the only stored information needing to be the map designs. Interestingly a potential limitation of Logisim was also discovered, namely variability in clock speeds when being run on different computers affecting the performance of circuits and therefore the difficulty level of the game.