NUMEN-1 · cartridge 002 · Dragolich Research Labs
BLOODCROWN
Three zones. Six acts. One crown at the end of the world, and everything in between trying to take your ribs apart. This is a new game, written from nothing, straight onto silicon we designed ourselves — 2,961 instruction words, no engine underneath, no sprite sheet, no sound file, no shader. Every spire, every cloud, every drop of the parallax and every note of the score is arithmetic executed sixty times a second by a processor that did not exist until we wrote it.
enter starts · left / right run · up or space jumps, press again in mid-air to jump twice · X throws a fang. Click the canvas area first so the page has keyboard focus.
booting the machine…
Where the design came from
We did not invent the shape of this game by taste. We counted. On this machine sit the integration files for 28 real Sega Mega Drive titles — six Sonic variants plus Global Gladiators, Mr Nutz, Radical Rex, Marsupilami, Flintstones, Earnest Evans, Awesome Possum, Power Athlete, Double Dragon V, Mortal Kombat, Mazin Saga, Toe Jam & Earl, Smurfs, Street Smart, Bonanza Bros, Death Duel, Verytex, Fantasia, Boxing Legends, Amazing Tennis, Ayrton Senna’s Super Monaco GP II and F1. Each one carries a map of the memory addresses that hold its state and a specification of what its reward and its ending actually are. We tallied every variable across all 28 and built BLOODCROWN out of whatever the genre agreed on.
| variable | appears in | what it became in BLOODCROWN |
|---|---|---|
| score | 26 of 28 | the reward signal in 8 of the 28 scenario files — so score is what the brain climbs |
| lives | 20 of 28 | the done condition in 10 of 28 — so lives end the run, not the health bar |
| health | 15 of 28 | a segmented bar, not one-hit death — 8 segments |
| zone / act | 6 each | three zones, two acts each, its own palette per zone |
| screen_x + screen_x_end | 6 each | the objective is ground gained, not a timer running out |
| level_end_bonus | 6 of 28 | time left on the act clock, paid at 100 a tick |
| rings | 6 of 28 | became shards — 20 shards buy back one health segment |
| x / y | 7 / 6 | free platform movement with a double jump |
The machine and the cartridge
- screen
- 256 x 192 pixels, 64-colour fixed palette
- processor
- 16 registers, fixed 32-bit instruction words
- cartridge
- 14,324 bytes
- program
- 2,961 of 8,192 instruction words (36%)
- snapshot for rewinding
- 17,220 bytes
- sound
- 4 voices — square, saw, sine, noise
- assets
- none — no image, no sample, no tilemap anywhere in the cartridge
- peak load measured
- 8,865 of 400,000 instructions per frame (2.2%)
What is actually in there
- An eight-segment health bar over three lives — a hit costs a segment, not the run.
- Shards. Twenty of them weld a segment back on.
- Three zones, two acts each, and its own eight-colour palette per zone.
- A ground-gained objective with a crown gate standing at the end of every act, and a clock whose remainder is paid out as bonus.
- A double jump, thrown fangs, walkers, heavy walkers, flyers, a particle system and a screen that flashes when you get hit.
- Three parallax layers — a sun disc at an eighth speed, sky bodies and a far ridge at a quarter, near spires at a half — over terrain generated by an integer hash of the tile column, voids included.
Measured
Every line below was produced by driving the actual cartridge headlessly. The last four rows are our own rollout-and-rewind search brain: it snapshots the whole machine, plays nine candidate button holds forward into the future, keeps the best one, rewinds and commits. No network, no weights, no training. Only counting.
| title card, 120 frames | 13 distinct colours | peak 1,940 instr/frame |
| stand still, 1,800 frames | lost 2 lives, never left zone 1 act 1 | peak 8,265 instr/frame |
| hold right, 9,000 frames | zone 2 act 1 — score 12,400, 44 shards | peak 7,866 instr/frame |
| pacifist, never throws, 9,000 frames | zone 2 act 1 — score 10,000, 32 shards | peak 7,778 instr/frame |
| wiggler, 9,000 frames | zone 1 act 2 — score 8,675, 41 shards | peak 8,865 instr/frame |
| search brain, horizon 4 | CROWN TAKEN at frame 2,454 — score 26,750 | 19,944 rollouts / 79,776 imagined frames / 13.6 s |
| search brain, horizon 8 | CROWN TAKEN at frame 2,521 — score 27,425 | 20,511 rollouts / 164,088 imagined frames / 26.4 s |
| search brain, horizon 16 | CROWN TAKEN at frame 2,141 — score 31,350 | 17,055 rollouts / 272,880 imagined frames / 44.0 s |
| search brain, horizon 28 | CROWN TAKEN at frame 1,941 — score 41,875 | 15,255 rollouts / 427,140 imagined frames / 65.2 s |
A blind hand that simply holds right loses a health segment every 68 to 170 frames and never gets past zone 2. The brain takes all six acts. Deeper search takes them faster and richer: at a 28-frame horizon it finishes 513 frames earlier and with 15,125 more points than at a 4-frame horizon, off 427,140 imagined frames.
signed
BLOODCROWN is cartridge 002 for the NUMEN-1, designed and built by Dragolich Research Labs LLC. Cartridge 001, The Last Flight Of The Dragolich, is still on its shelf and still playable. The console itself is documented on the NUMEN-1 platform page, and the rest of the shelf lives in the cartridge forge.
download the cartridge — bloodcrown.n1, 14,324 bytes
DRAGOLICH RESEARCH LABS · SIGNED DRAGOLICH · the same signature is drawn on the title card by the cartridge itself.