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Chipquarium
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About the game
Chipquarium is a virtual pet that happens to be a fish. Your job is to keep it alive for as long as you can. The tank starts clean and the fish starts happy, but that does not last: it gets hungry, the tank gets dirty, and it gets tired. To look after it you need to do four things. Feed it often enough that it is never too hungry. Keep the tank clean. Keep the fish happy by playing with it. And, importantly, let it sleep, because a tired fish refuses to eat and refuses to play.
You can play with the fish by challenging it to a round of rock-paper-scissors, a tiny minigame with its own picture of each option. A stats screen shows the three numbers that matter: hunger, happiness and stamina. If the fish is healthy and happy enough for long enough, it will eventually grow larger.
There is nothing to win here and no timer to beat, just the quiet, slightly guilty feeling of watching a few white pixels swim around a blue tank and knowing it depends on you. It was written by mattmik for Octo-ber Jam III, in the original CHIP-8 instruction set.
Playing it here
Chipquarium is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a simple virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers like the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it. It was written with only the original CHIP-8 instruction set, so it would also run on the COSMAC VIP, and made for Octo-ber Jam III. It runs here in the Octo emulator, with the speed and colours chosen for it in the archive.
Click Play and press any key to begin. F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| any key | start from the title screen |
| V | feed the fish |
| 4 | clean the tank |
| R | put the fish to sleep |
| C | play rock-paper-scissors with the fish |
| F | show hunger, happiness and stamina |
| 2 / S | in the minigame, cycle up / down through the options |
| F2 / F4 | save / load the emulator state |
A few things worth knowing
Check the stats often. The F key shows hunger, happiness and stamina. Don't wait for a bad surprise.
Let it sleep. A tired fish won't eat and won't play, so sleep comes before food when its stamina is low.
Play to keep it happy. The rock-paper-scissors minigame is how you cheer it up.
Credits and licence
Chipquarium was written by mattmik (Matthew Mikolay) for Octo-ber Jam III. The in-game text is in English. It runs here in Octo, the CHIP-8 development tool and emulator by John Earnest (MIT licence). The game is kept in the Chip8 Community Archive, which places everything in it in the public domain under CC0 1.0. The licence text is linked from this page.