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.

T-Rex Poop Quest Release Announcement

Hyperlink your way over to potatoclockgames.com to check out T-Rex Poop Quest, a short text-based RPG featuring a T-Rex, some poop, and a bunch of quests, among other things. Other things like playground-terrorizing dinosaur punks, a drug addicted pterodactyl, Bill Clinton, a gang of yuppie raptors, plenty of stolen and unattributed art assets and intellectual property and lots, lots, more!

Actually, not that much more. It's pretty short. Have fun!

T-Rex Poop Quest

I'm just about finished with the Twine RPG that I mentioned earlier, just some proof reading & balancing & bug squashing to take care of.

When it comes to making a reasonably featured RPG, Twine really isn't the tool for the job. It was fun to make one, and you could certainly make something much more complicated with Twine, there just isn't much reason to. This game was a little experiment to see how far I could push Twine before it stopped being fun & I think I found that point.

It's a short, grindy, fetch questy RPG called T-Rex Poop Quest, and it features what is possibly the most shallow battle system ever implemented in any game ever. Still, I think it brings some things to the table, you know, enriches the genre somewhat. Like, you know how RPGs never have a "Sarah Palin's Fart in a Can" item that you have to carry around? Well, don't worry, we've ticked that box for sure.

T-Rex Poop Quest should be ready to play in like a week.

OSFBM'97 is Dead.

"In a shocking move, indie giant Potato Clock Games infuriated investors this morning when they announced the official cancellation of the year's most hotly anticipated title, Outer Space Future Battle Massacre 1997. Potato Clock Games could not be reached for comment."

-The Wall Street Journal