TROGBlog

Seems pretty nice, though the current means of showing the clues seems a little 'blah'. The original used the clues "I feel a draft.", "I smell a wumpus!", and "Bats nearby!". It doesn't really make sense to have such clues present in the rooms nearest the hazards without having them present in the connecting hallways, but if the clues were harmlessly present in the hallways that would degrade the game.

 

Perhaps the pits can be surrounded by deadly slides and the Wumpus always surrounded by snapable twigs (which would, of course, awaken the wumpus).

Part of Hunt the Wumpus is you don't know which direction the Wumpus etc is in. So you have to figure out where the Wumpus is by slowly tracking in.

The inspiration for this game is the TI99 version of Hunt the Wumpus, written in 1980. Just as the 1979 Atari version of Adventure is a graphical adaptation of the early 1970s text game Adventure, the TI99 version is a graphical adaptation of the early 1970s text game Hunt the Wumpus.

 

I've played the original text version of Hunt the Wumpus. It's fun, but it's also tedious. It's virtually impossible to win without using a pencil and paper to write down all 20 rooms and the 30 or so tunnels that randomly connect the rooms. The TI99 version did an excellent job of graphically representing the random relationships of the rooms, thereby capturing the essence of the original game, while at the same time effectively removing the tedium of manually mapping out the connections between the rooms. And like the original game, the tunnels are benign. It's only the rooms the player has to worry about. When you play the completed game, this may make more sense.

 

In either case, the gameplay of the TI99 version works. I've played literally thousands of games of Hunt the Wumpus on the TI99. That game has unquestionable replayability, so I'm sticking with it as the model for my game.

 

I do, however, plan a few variations for setting difficulty that haven't been done before. One that I like is no guided arrows. On the easy mode, the arrow is guided, which means once you have determined where the Wumpus is, you only have to shoot into the correct tunnel to kill him. On the hard mode, you will have to be in an immediately adjacent tile space to hit the Wumpus. This means that before shooting, you must determine if there is a tunnel between your cavern and the Wumpus' lair. If there is a tunnel, you will have to follow it until you are just about to enter the Wumpus' lair and then shoot. I'm looking forward to that challenge.

 

There won't be any ropes or extra arrows. I will probably add the bat, although I never liked him much. The bat provides a resolution to the fact that on rare occasions it is possible to generate a random map where portions of the map are isolated, and cannot be accessed without teleporting.

 

Regarding the permutations of the original game, can anyone demonstrate the math for how many tunnels would be necessary to connect 20 rooms, given that there are 3 tunnels per room? I think the answer is 30, but I can't prove it.

Regarding the permutations of the original game, can anyone demonstrate the math for how many tunnels would be necessary to connect 20 rooms, given that there are 3 tunnels per room? I think the answer is 30, but I can't prove it.

 

It's very easy. There are sixty "tunnel ends", since each room has three. Each tunnel has two ends. Therefore, there are thirty tunnels.