jcoffey-dev
e28a2e41cf
These moved from the Coffey-Labs org to jcoffey-dev, where they belong. GitHub redirects a transferred repository, so nothing was broken by leaving them -- but a source link that lands via a redirect is still naming an owner that no longer holds the code, and the redirect only lasts as long as nobody creates a repository of the same name in the old place. Only the seven repositories that actually moved are rewritten. Every other Coffey-Labs URL is left alone: ihasmail, cairnobs and the rest are still there.
106 lines
5.0 KiB
Markdown
106 lines
5.0 KiB
Markdown
# Notice, credits and provenance
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## What this is
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An independent reimplementation of *Hunt the Wumpus*, the cave-hunting game
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that went round timesharing systems and then every home computer of the
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following decade, written from scratch in TypeScript in 2026.
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## Credit where it is due
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- **Gregory Yob**, 1973 — wrote the original, reportedly out of irritation at
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how many computer games of the day were played on a grid. Hanging the rooms
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on a dodecahedron instead is the whole idea, and it is his.
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- **People's Computer Company** and **Creative Computing**, who carried the
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listing and the article that explained it.
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- Every type-in book and school terminal that passed it along, which is how
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most people met it.
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This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone connected to the
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original. No original source code was used, consulted or copied.
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## How this code came to exist
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Clean-room, and worth being specific about because it is what makes the licence
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below meaningful:
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- **The rules are not ours to own, and we use them freely.** Twenty rooms,
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three tunnels each, two pits, two bats, one wumpus, five crooked arrows that
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fly through five rooms, a wumpus that wakes three times in four. Game
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mechanics are ideas rather than expression; nobody gets to fence them off,
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and so may you use them.
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- **The cave is the cave.** `src/game/cave.ts` uses the room numbering every
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listing of this game has used since 1973 — room 1 leads to 2, 5 and 8 — so
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that a transcript from a magazine still makes sense against it. A numbering
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is a fact about a graph, not a piece of writing. It is written out by hand
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and then *proved* to be a dodecahedron in `cave.test.ts` rather than
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trusted.
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- **The artwork and the music are ours.** Every mark on the map is SVG
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generated from the graph in code, and every note is generated by the synth in
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`src/audio/`. There are no imported assets of any kind.
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- **The synth is shared with its sibling.** `src/audio/synth.ts` is the same
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engine as the one in [lemonade](https://github.com/jcoffey-dev/lemonade) —
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same author, same licence. What is written for it here is new.
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## The words on screen are ours, deliberately
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This is the part worth reading, because the obvious thing to do was the wrong
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thing.
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The 1973 game has famous lines in it. Anyone who played it can still quote the
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one about the bats. Those sentences are Gregory Yob's writing, not a rule and
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not a fact — and a project released under a copyleft licence has no business
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licensing words it did not write. The sibling project went back and took the
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original's wording out of itself for exactly this reason; this one never
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shipped with it.
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So every line the machine prints here was written for this project:
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| What the game has to say | Where the words came from |
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| --- | --- |
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| the three warnings | ours (`SENSE_TEXT` in `src/game/constants.ts`) |
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| the four deaths, and the kill | ours (`DEATH_TEXT`, `WIN_TEXT`) |
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| being carried off by bats | ours (`BATS_TEXT`) |
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| the refusal, the prompts | ours |
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| the instructions screen | ours — the rules are Yob's, the sentences are not |
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Two things are still not original, and neither is a copyright question:
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- **The name.** It is still *Hunt the Wumpus*, and the animal is still a
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wumpus. Names and short titles are not subject to copyright, and it is kept
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deliberately — calling it something else would be pretending this is a
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different game, which would be less honest rather than more.
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- **`YOU ARE IN ROOM 12` and `TUNNELS LEAD TO 3 11 13`.** These are the only
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sensible words for what they report, and the order follows from the fact
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that you need to know where you are before the exits mean anything. There is
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no creative expression in them to own.
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## One rule that is ours
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Yob's game is a single cave: you kill the wumpus or it kills you, and either
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way that is the end. Here a kill is a door rather than an ending — you go
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deeper, into a fresh cave with the same twenty rooms and whatever arrows you
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did not spend, until something gets you. It is a frame around the 1973 game
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rather than a change to it: every hunt inside it is the original, unaltered,
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and the reasoning is in `src/game/constants.ts`.
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## Licence
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Copyright (C) 2026 John Coffey.
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This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
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the terms of the **GNU Affero General Public License** as published by the Free
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Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any
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later version — see [LICENSE](LICENSE).
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AGPL rather than plain GPL because the leaderboard is a network service: §13
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means anyone who runs a modified copy of this for other people over a network
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has to offer them its source. Running the game without the scores service is
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entirely supported and imposes nothing extra.
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This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
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WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
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PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
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*None of the above is legal advice.*
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