The Return of the WUMPUS BASTARDS Leaderboard!

Play WUMPUS BASTARDS here!

I've never been able to convince anyone else that this is a good game, but I genuinely love it.

The high score table has been broken for years because the database was stored on a university server which I eventually lost access to after graduation. By that time I had completely forgotten how PHP and SQL and all that worked, so I kept putting it off, but it only took like an hour to fix once I finally sat down to figure it out.

The old leaderboard is lost to time, so there's plenty of room to make your mark. If you're into logic puzzles, long winded game manuals, and drawing crazy maps then this is your game. See you in the putrid caverns of the Wumpus abomination, wretched hunter!

Wumpus Bastards Release Announcement

Play it today at potatoclockgames.com!

What a bastard.

Wumpus Bastards Update #3

Alright, Wumpus Bastards is feature complete, including a jankity online leaderboard. Lots of work left to do in terms of writing, CSS formatting and UI stuff but I'm at the point where I could quit & still have a game that I'm pretty happy with.

Probably just, like, you know, a week or so to go ^TM.

Wumpus Bastards Update #2

So web development, as it turns out, is a pain in the ass. Browsers rarely complain; it's probably part of the reason that the internet got so popular so quickly and it makes it hard to fuck up a simple text & images sort of website, but it also makes debugging a bit of a nightmare. Here's the sort of error message you usually get:

Just Google "WHY DOES NOTHING WORK WHAT IS HAPPENING IT'S JUST WHITE".

 Or, if you're lucky:

SHIP IT.

And debugging webshit is sort of a bubblegum & shoelace MacGyver kind of situation:

I finally spotted the missing parens while cropping this in mspaint.

It was more of a struggle than expected just to get a basic Hunt the Wumpus game going, but it's done. I've got quite a bit of new stuff in there, too; the biggest new mechanics are level exits, which open when you kill the wumpus & lead to ever more dangerous caverns, and a stamina gauge which decreases every time you move, adding a little more tension to exploration. I've added enough stuff that just about every room has something interesting going on, from cave taco oases to the classic instakill bottomless pits. Lots of UI stuff to go, balancing, that sort of thing. Probably like half done? Which means, like, 10%, you know.

Wumpus Bastards Update #1

Had to take a Wumpus Bastards break to concentrate on another project for school; that project was another game which will probably morph into a Potato Clock Games title in the near future. I'm thinking of calling it Cockblockalypse. You'll just have to wait & see.

Anyway, now it's back to Wumpus Bastards. I have the next week off, so hopefully I can resist the siren call of Kerbal Space Program & get some REAL WORK done.

Introducing Wumpus Bastards

Hunt the Wumpus ranks right up there with Rogue as one of The Great Original Computer Games. As a kid, I played a bunch of the Texas Instruments graphical remake of Hunt the Wumpus on what, in my memory, was a Commodore 64 (though may have actually been a TI99) but it wasn't until quite recently that I played Gregory Yob's original masterpiece. As a dude who likes to draw his own maps in video games, I found the original text-based version to be quite a bit more engaging. Also, dodecahedrons. No offense to toroids, but I mean, come on.

Dr. Charles Owen, who is a member of my karass, recently assigned the HTML5/PHP implementation of a particularly Yob-like Hunt the Wumpus game in a web app development class I'm currently taking. Now I'm reworking the interface & rebuilding the game engine with plans to add in a bunch of additional gameplay elements to give it more of a dungeon crawly feel. There will be multiple levels with multiple Wumpus*, hence the working title Wumpus Bastards.

It feels like this bad boy is going to be finished in like a week, which probably means it'll be done in a couple of months or so.

* I really want to say 'Wumpii' or maybe 'Wumpuses', but if I'm being real, Wumpus feels like an invariant noun.

We're back, baby.

The Potato Clock Games team has put aside their fundamental religious, political & sexual differences, their seething animosities and their dark lust for the arcane wisdom of the ancient underworld to come together for a grand project, a king scheme, the realization of a plan hatched in a madman's fever dream:

Woe to the beast. Woe to its hunter.

"Failure is not an option."
-popularly attributed to NASA mission control Flight Director Gene Kranz but actually made up by some Hollywood guy.