HOW TO – Text Adventure – Arduino Retro Gaming “Hunt the Wumpus”
From the first time I saw the D-Pad on the RGB LCD shield, I knew I wanted to play a game on the Arduino. After a bit of thinking, I settled on Hunt the Wumpus as a good fit:
Different screens can have different backlight colors
The LCD is large enough for selecting caves to move to or shoot into
The Wumpus, bat, and pit can all have custom characters
While coding Hunt the Wumpus, I ran into a problem with one of my functions. I wanted to use an enum to represent different hazards (bats, pits, Wumpus) and have a common function to check a given cave for hazards and return the enum of the first one found. This helps with showing hazards in neighboring caves as well as checking a cave before the player moves into it.
I started by declaring a function which returns an enum:
Unfortunately, this resulted in the following error message:
Hunt_The_Wumpus:-1: error: 'HazardType' does not name a type
It turns out that this is a known issue with a documented workaround and the fix was as simple as adding a header file to my project which contains the enum declaration and a function prototype:
The full source is available on github so you too can hunt the Wumpus (or, perhaps, be eaten by the Wumpus).
What other classic games would be a good fit for the RGB LCD shield?
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I am both thrilled and disappointed. I had the same idea myself a while back as an exercise in using a similar, but not nearly as RGB, LCD & button shield available elsewhere. The idea got tossed on the todo pile along with many other idea.
I am excited to see it implemented. It seems like many of the text based games from the 80’s might be a fun port to the Arduino and LCD shield. (see “Basic Computer Games” and “More Basic Computer Games”.)
I am both thrilled and disappointed. I had the same idea myself a while back as an exercise in using a similar, but not nearly as RGB, LCD & button shield available elsewhere. The idea got tossed on the todo pile along with many other idea.
I am excited to see it implemented. It seems like many of the text based games from the 80’s might be a fun port to the Arduino and LCD shield. (see “Basic Computer Games” and “More Basic Computer Games”.)