Wumpus Wump You

Hello friends I have made a prototype over the last couple weeks (while teaching myself Typescript) that I thought I would share. It’s pretty simple right now, but I think it’s still pretty fun. Like a messy, tangled, RNG-heavy minesweeper.

I think this could be a nice base to build a pretty rich game on. I like the power that text affords, and I’d love to make a little ecosystem that the player could interact with.

Runs in a browser. It’s probably best on a PC – might work on a phone but I don’t have uh a very modern phone so it’s hard for me to tell. It looks fine in the Chrome breakpoints but it looks like shit on my phone so idk!

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ok it looks ok on my phone now and it runs pretty decently but watch out because sometimes you’ll need to scroll down to see more buttons and that’s not very telegraphed.

would also like to have on-map movement but i’ll need to figure out an interface for it that you won’t accidentally trigger when trying to organize the map.

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That was fun!

Trying to wrangle a completed map into something non-overlapping is also fun (doubt this is possible a majority of the time tho).

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Yeah there are some maps that look nice, and some that are like irreparably tangled.

My algorithm for map creation is make a big loop with the rooms (so that there’s always 2 ways to get somewhere) and then just connect the rest of the rooms randomly together.

There are a couple ways of scaling the maps up, but just naively doing that with 100 rooms or something creates a giant mess. I think I would need to come up with an algorithm that prefers more localized connections, or sort of make different groups of rooms, and I connect those groups together in a final step.

It could also be level based, or have some puzzle you need to solve to open the door to the next area.

I need to work on some engine stuff to support like entities with turns between yours, but once I do that I think it’ll be pretty quick to start implementing ideas. Not quite sure what will work yet, but I’ll build up first and then tear some stuff out when I figure out what works and what doesn’t.

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I remember playing a browser game when I was in like highschool or college that was about untangling random graphs like this. Was pretty satisfying!

Yo, I hunted a wumpus! Got it on my fourth of fifth try.

As the person who ran a wumpus jam 3 summers ago, I really dig this. I think you can build this out in any number of non-wumpusy directions, too! Feels slick in the right way.

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Yeah I like that the map makes the text-based game more accessible, and beyond that it frees up mental bandwidth the player would have spent tracking the map themselves.

I feel very free in terms of mechanics I could try and I think non-grid games are really fun to explore and navigate.

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I like the map getting hopelessly tangled because it forces you to keep messing with it. This was fun, I look forward to whatever may be built on this!

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Untangle, from Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection?

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The one I remember playing was timed and maybe in flash but I did forget about that game in the puzzle pack!

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Made the mobile layout look a lot better:
mobile2

Let me know if anyone is having weird layout issues on mobile still. Providing a screenshot and what device you’re on would help! Works pretty well on my phone now.

Also added saves between sessions and a small menu for restarting the game and re-centering the map.

With that maintenance out of the way I’m probably gonna add new features next.

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I played a bunch of this the other night, and I loved it. Gonna try it on mobile now!

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Known issue: sometimes it’s not obvious that the button view can scroll. I think I need a more obvious indicator than a tiny scrollbar showing up.

turn count? nodes seen?

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much nicer, cheers


and is the graph rearranging itself nicer now?

in terms of features it might be nice to be able to mark a room, though idk how you’d implement that on mobile given you already have press-and-drag bound

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Yeah custom annotations are definitely planned and I haven’t thought of a good interface yet for them either :slight_smile:

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what I tried naturally the first time I played was to drag the clue indicator letter to the node I thought was the source. won’t work for ‘W’

A reveal map button at the end of the game would be the nicest thing to add imo.

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Added these for post-game:

  • Reveal map button
  • Turns Taken
  • Rooms Visited
  • Win Streak

Also enjoy this impossible game that my friend got. If this game stays a strict puzzle like this I might need to prevent that eventually.

I’ve been working on an annotation interface in another code branch. Making progress, but nothing to show yet. Think it’s necessary to add new gameplay features I want to experiment with.

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