adventure game

2 Articles

Hack Your Own Adventure Story With Yarn Spinner

May 18, 2024 by 8 Comments

We are big fans of programmed texts for education. You know, the kind where you answer a question and go to a new page based on your answer. But they can also be entertaining “choose your own adventure” stories. You might say, “You are standing in front of an oak door, two meters high, with an iron handle. Do you a) open it? b) knock on it? c) ignore it?” Then, based on your answer, you go to a different part of the story. These are tough to write, but you can get some help using Yarn Spinner and the Yarn scripting language.

The original purpose of Yarn is to produce conversations for games. There’s a tutorial for that. The difference is to produce a book, you get a choose your own adventure PDF at the end. For the tutorial, you can try to read the text on the left-hand side of the editor or just press Test (at the top) and let it “read” the tutorial to you, which is a little more fluid.

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A small PCB with a microcontroller, two 7-segment LED displays, a speaker and some buttons

Hunt The Lunpus Is An ATtiny-Based Minimalist Game Console

July 22, 2022 by 9 Comments

In a world where game consoles come with ever-higher resolutions and ever-faster frame rates, it’s refreshing to see someone going in the opposite direction: [Doug McInnes]’s latest project is a tiny handheld game console with probably the lowest-resolution graphics possible. Hardware-wise, it’s a small PCB containing an ATtiny84, two seven-segment LED displays, a speaker and a handful of buttons. It’s the software that gives this project its magic, and all of it is available on GitHub, along with schematics and a PCB layout.

The game is called Hunt the Lunpus, and as the name suggests it’s inspired by the 1970s classic Hunt the Wumpus. The player moves through a maze of interconnected rooms, trying to avoid slime pits and marauding bats while searching for the Lunpus, a sleeping monster that will eat the player unless they defeat it first by shooting it with arrows. Four pushbuttons provide directional control, with a fifth serving as an “action” button to start the game and fire those arrows.

Whereas Wumpus was originally a text-based adventure game, Lunpus is fully graphical: the seven-segment displays indicate the cave’s walls, and flash in different ways to alert the player to the various hazards. [Doug] explains the events as they happen in the video embedded below; while it might take a bit of practice to find your way at first, we can already picture ourselves wandering through the caves with our quiver full of arrows, ready to hunt some Lunpus. Who needs 4K graphics, anyway?

If you’re into minimalist game consoles, there’s plenty to choose from: the LEDBOY renders Space Invaders on just a few LEDs, while TWANG needs nothing more than a single LED strip. You can also explore more mazes on this 8×8 LED matrix, or even hunt Wumpuses in a slightly-higher resolution.

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