BitWise

BitWise is a puzzle game about electricity and the machines built from it. You place components on a workbench, wire them by hand and run the circuit in a real simulator. The grader has no answer key: a circuit passes when it does what the level requires, though some levels require a specific component or approach.

Build circuits

You begin with a battery, lamp, switch and return path, then progress through circuits that process signals and store information. Components and circuits you build can be sealed as chips and reused in later levels: an XOR made from NAND gates, for example, can become a chip, and adding an AND gate creates a half adder. You can combine gates into a latch, use a clock to make a flip-flop, and arrange flip-flops into a counter. Later, you build an ALU and program ROM, then make a machine that follows orders and halts itself.

Seven chapters

The campaign map, the Iron Heart, is itself a machine, and you build it in the third chapter. Its seven chapters cover different subsystems:

• The Spark: work with a battery, lamp, switch and return path, then rub amber, charge an electroscope and watch a spark cross a gap.
• Currents & Light: use resistors, capacitors, diodes, a transistor and an op-amp; wind a transformer yourself and build the coil that appears on the title screen.
• The Electromechanical Arts: explore how current wrapped around iron makes it move, through a relay, burglar alarm, telegraph relay, buzzer, generator that needs no battery and motor.
• The Boolean Engine: learn AND, OR and NOT, then NAND and how to build everything from NAND. Test truth tables by tapping a row, and work with comparators and an invisible glitch.
• The Calculating Engine: read bits as numbers and teach circuits to add, carry, subtract and multiply.
• Memory & Time: make circuits retain information with a latch, flip-flop, counter, clock, address book and stored program.
• The Telegraph: learn Morse by ear, send it by hand on a telegraph key, then build a receiver that reads it.

Test and inspect

Analog benches use the same nodal analysis as SPICE, while digital components settle each tick. The Inspector's Probe shows the live voltage of any component. You can add a trace to the Oscillograph to watch a counter tick or a relay switch alternating current from two batteries. The grader evaluates what a circuit does: an unconventional solution can pass if it works, but a level teaching the relay will not accept a lamp lit by routing around it.

Learn at your pace

Each new idea has its own level before later levels build on it, and you can predict an output before testing it. Hints have three levels, from a nudge to the full build. The Almanac includes a concept map, a toolkit of every component you have sealed and a codex covering the history behind the ideas, including Shannon's thesis, telegraph stations that earthed their return wire and the SRAM cell.

Levels and tools

At launch, the game has 238 levels: a 168-level main path across the seven chapters and 70 optional levels. Optional level families include Diagnose & Repair, The Glitch You Cannot See, The Address Book and The Machine That Follows Orders. It also includes:

• A Sandbox with open benches, a level editor and Steam Workshop sharing
• The Wireless Room, a Koch-method Morse trainer
• Three-star goals and 14 achievements
• Game-generated sound effects and music

Controls and settings

Every level can be played with the mouse alone. Settings include colour-blind assistance, with a colour-blind-safe wire palette and a 1/0 output readout, a reduce-motion option, and separate master and music volume controls. On campaign Morse levels, signals also appear as light, so those levels can be played without sound; the optional Lights Out drill is copied by ear alone. Telegraph sending levels require timed key presses.