Mugwump

Having many similarities to Hunt the Hurkle, Mugwump is another game where you hunt for a creature on a 10x10 grid. It was released at around the same time.

In Mugwump, you have to find the eponymous creature on the grid by guessing at its coordinates. Each time you get it wrong, the game tells you how far away the Mugwump is from your chosen spot. This is in contrast to Hunt the Hurkle, which tells you the direction. The distance is the taxicab distance: imagine that the world is a grid street plan where you can only travel in the four cardinal directions; the distance is the number of blocks you would have to travel to reach your target.

In Mugwump you need to keep track of the clues over a number of guesses, to see if you are getting closer to the target. If you pay close attention then you can soon narrow down the Mugwump's location to a couple of potential spots. Unlike in Hunt the Hurkle, starting in the centre isn't much use. Instead, starting at or near a corner will give you a much better idea of the whereabouts of the Mugwump.

The Mugwump game code makes more use of subroutines than Hunt the Hurkle; in addition to the random number subroutine, another helps to calculate the taxicab distance between the player's guess and the actual location of the Mugwump. The IF statement on line 60 shows how to calculate an absolute value in the absence of a built-in ABS function.

FIlename: mugwump.bas.

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