2006-07-12 Hunting the Mammoth

I’d like to write a little game in Scheme. That would allow me to practice a bit, and see whether Scheme and Lisp are useful languages or not for non-Emacs work. 😉 Note Steve Yegge’s rant Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp, as he says “Not for any value of Lisp.” I think I discovered this via Matt Diley’s link ¹ regarding the title of Steve Yegge’s followup, Software Needs Philosophers. Anyway, I didn’t find the two Steve Yegge articles too interesting, but I *am* interested in figuring out whether I can use Scheme or Common Lisp for a real project.

Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp

Software Needs Philosophers

So here’s the project. It involves strategy: You command a band of Neanderthals hunting for food. The basic premise is that you are slower and weaker than the animals you are hunting. That’s where the strategy comes in. Here’s my brainstorming:

Humans move one square.
Mammoths move one square.
Mammoths will flee away from humans, but when hurt and near a human, they will attack instead. Similarly, if young mammoths are nearby, humans will be attacked.
Young mammoths will follow old mammoths, so you can drive a herd in a certain direction, if you manage to stay away from the young ones.
An attacking mammoth will kill a human with a single blow.
A human can throw a spear at a mammoth (two squares). Five spears are required to kill the strongest mammoth, three to kill the young ones.
Humans can be younger, or more experienced than the average hunter, in which case they can either run faster, or throw deadlier spears.
Humans can drive mammoths down cliffs.
Humans can hide in the grass.
Deer are much faster than mammoths.
Only male deers are dangerous. It requires two blows by a stag to kill a human.
It only takes on spear to kill a deer.
Humans can carry only one spear. It might be possible design something in the game that allows humans to carry more spears but only run or attack while carrying one spear, but I’m not sure this will make the game more fun.
Without a spear, humans can still drive away animals.
Both animals and humans can escape off the map.
Sabretooth tigers are both a competition and a danger to humans.
There will be cliffs that cannot be climbed, and falling down the cliffs is deadly.
I might introduce bogs later.

I hope that this will allow me to do some interesting “level design”. A game like Sokoban.

Sokoban

Plus, coding the AI for the animals could be fun. Herding, exploring, fleeing: Sounds interesting. Once this is all done, we might also explore the opposite: Getting your herd safely off the map when beset by humans.