I’ve been reading Jason Dyer’s blog, Renga in Blue, over the past week, and it got me in the mood to try a silly little coding challenge.
After reading his article on the seminal early proto-adventure game Hunt the Wumpus, I decided to see how fast I could port the original game to Perl, based purely on the description in Jason’s article.
The answer is about 90 minutes, though it would be less if the kids were out and I didn’t have to help with dinner.
So here, quick and dirty, is Hunt the Wumpus. It should run on any reasonable computer that has Perl installed (ie., pretty much any desktop linux box, and any other desktop operating system whose owner has installed it.).
Hunt the Wumpus is a simple little game based sort of abstractly on hide-and-seek. You play a hunter in a dark cave pursuing a beast. Your goal is to shoot an arrow into the room where the beast hides, without getting too close, while avoiding bottomless pits and flocks of bats.
It’s… Not really up to the level of complexity you expect in a video game unless you are quite an old person (The TI-99/4A port is possibly the first computer game I ever played). But I present it here as a curiosity for anyone who’s interested to enjoy, and basically just because it was a small project for me to tackle to flex my coding muscles on something fun for once.
Maybe I’ll flesh it out a little as a further exercise. On the drive home, I was contemplating an automated proof-of-solvability. I’m not sure the original Wumpus map actually can be rendered insoluble, but the alternate maps for Wumpus 2 can be.