After "finishing" Startrek, I found the exercise to be rather interesting as well as entertaining. I remembered another game that was on my first micro-computer called "Hunt the Wumpus". My daughter liked playing that game on that computer. Hunt the Wumpus was developed by Gregory Yob, in 1971 or '72. He found that nearly all computer games of the time, there were not that many really, were based on a square grid. He found that to be rather boring or simplistic so he based his game on a much more complex structure, a dodecahedron, a 3 dimensional figure with 12 pentagonal faces. Rather than use the faces, however, he chose to use the intersections of the faces, the edges as well as the points. It is a game of hide and seek where the player attempts to locate and exterminate the fierce wumpus somewhere in his cave that is based on the dodecahedron. The intersection points are 20 cave rooms and the edges are tunnels between the rooms, three tunnels from each room. There are also various hazards, besides the wumpus, within the cave.
There are numerous versions of Hunt the Wumpus on the internet today. Most seem to be "play on line". The original was written in Basic and also was text based. In further digging in the old paper files, I found a printed copy from the micro which was also written in Basic, this time original Basic which was extremely basic, no pun intended. It allowed single letter variable names although I seem to remember you could append a single digit to each letter to make more than just 26 variables. Even 26, with that weak naming convention, was enough to make a program non-readable. I chose Java for this one also. Fortunately, it is a much smaller and simpler program.
After making it work, again as a simple text based game played in
a Linux terminal, I decided to do some enhancements. First, rather
than run from a terminal, I put it into a graphic display. Now the
game itself is still text based but the display all falls within
the form shown here. Then I added an option to display complete
instructions for the game. That appears in another popup, the first
page of which is shown next.
Next, I added yet another option that can supply a full description
of the dodecahedron. There is also some cautions with that option.
It is not strictly in the original spirit of the game as one should
try to figure out the configuration from multiple attempts. The
original game certainly did not give that much information. Last,
I added some player aids to the program as assistance in navigating
the cave. These are the items the player had to write down in the
original version. If you want the original experience then you must
not ask for these features. I find it still somewhat challenging
even when using them though. I won't show the cave here since that
might spoil it for you.
Spoiler Alert All right, if you really want to see the cave description, click here but don't say I didn't warn you.
