Portugues
Chicken Scratch
Saved games stay in this browser only.
About the game
Chicken Scratch puts you in charge of a chicken on bug patrol. The farmyard is a maze of wooden fences, larger than the screen, and a handful of beetles are wandering around in it. Walk up to a beetle, face it and peck to catch it.
There are three rounds, with four, six and then eight beetles to catch. A clock runs during each round, and at the end the game shows your time for every round and your total, so the real challenge is doing it faster next time.
Playing it here
This is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a small virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers like the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it today. Chicken Scratch targets XO-CHIP, a modern extension that adds colour and better sound, and was made for Octojam 7, a yearly CHIP-8 game jam. It runs here in the Octo emulator.
Click Play and press Space to leave the title screen. F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too: the D-pad moves, A pecks and B squawks.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| W A S D or arrow keys | turn to face a direction; hold to walk, keep holding to dash |
| E or Space | peck the square in front of the chicken; start the game |
| Q | squawk: marks the edge of the screen in the direction of beetles you can't see |
| F2 / F4 | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
A tap only turns you. Pressing a new direction first turns the chicken to face it; she starts walking if you keep the key down. That makes it easy to line up a peck without overshooting.
Hold to dash. Keep a direction held after the first step and the chicken breaks into a run, kicking up dust. It is the quickest way across the yard.
Squawk when the screen is empty. The yard scrolls, so the last beetles are often out of sight. Q flashes markers on the screen edges pointing towards them.
Credits and licence
Chicken Scratch was created by John Earnest, who also wrote the Octo toolchain and emulator and maintains the Chip8 Community Archive. The game is in the public domain under CC0 1.0, like everything in that archive, and the Octo emulator is released under the MIT licence. The licence text is linked from this page.