Camel Conversion for Twine

Here is a conversion of Camel. I can vaguely remember coding and playing this game as a kid in the early '80s. If it left that kind of impression then it must've been a fun game so I decided to give this a shot for a Twine conversion. It is similar in many ways to Highnoon in that there is an underlying game system represented by some quirky text.

• Play Camel online.
• Get the source code.

The game play can be frustrating! Oases appear frequently enough that water is almost never a problem (just don't forget to drink). The biggest problem is the pygmies. They have a 10% speed advantage on your moderate speed, but running your camel at full speed burns it out three times faster.

SPOLIER: The mathematically optimal strategy is to go full speed twice, moderate speed once then rest. Drink when warned (actually the turn after). If you are captured then wait for the ransom. Even with an optimal strategy a win is not assured. In this game the player loses more often than not. Prepare for frustration.

I made extensive use of the custom macro <<randomp>> that I made for another project. This simplified a lot of the handling where things were triggered by random events.

I intentionally left as much logic in place as it is in the BASIC code with a couple of small changes. The capture submenu display the request for sub-command before the menu and the "Miles travelled" text appears more than in the original. There was also something where asking for a status report would fall through to also taking a drink. I assumed that this was a bug and changed status report to not force a drink at the same time.

From the viewpoint of 2012 the text could appear offensive. I prefer to think of it is ironically anachronistic because there are many obviously mismatched facts and intentional mispellings. Many of the other books edited by David Ahl do contain some quite detailed information about the historical context of the games so I do not assume the authors of this game were naively flavouring the game they way they did.

Checkout the other games I have converted