Keep Drogon Alive

Keep Drogon alive is a submission to IndiQ game jam and LDJAM46. It's a joint project betwen me and llunapuert. llunapuert contributed to the game idea and the BGM. 

Instructions:

- Start the game: press Z (displayed as a circle in PICO-8 games)

- Move Drogon: left and right arrows

- Change Drogon’s color (quantum state): press X 

What is this game about?

On the surface, this game is a Game of Thrones theme, inverse space invader, Ikaruga-clone. Beneath the surface, it runs on a simulated quantum computer and demonstrate an important concept in quantum physics!

When Drogon is red, its state is |0>; when it's blue, its state is |+> = |0>+|1>. When the arrow is read, it's a Z-basis measurement; when it's blue, it's a X-basis measurement. Whether Drogon gets hit is determined by the measurement outcome of |1>. When Drogon and arrow have the same color, the measurement outcome is 100% |0>, 0% |1> and therefore, it never gets hit. When they are not the same color, the measurement outcome is 50% |0> and 50% |1> and therefore, Drogon gets hit 50% of the time.

The quantum computing aspect is implemented by a MicroQiskit-Lua quantum simulator developed by Decodoku.

The science is demo using Qiskit in a jupyter notebook  here.