Wander

An open-source 3D orienteering game, with an excessively simple landscape.

You're provided with a map, which shows eight flags you're supposed to locate in a landscape of land and water. The trick is not to get lost. If started from the Linux command line, the game will write to the command-line window whenever you find a flag.

I've always been annoyed by 3D games with gorgeous scenery that won't let you stop and just look; instead, someone shows up to shoot at you or something. And if you've killed all the enemies, do you get reward yourself by being a tourist? No. The game shuts down.

So in Wander, no one shoots at you, and the game does not shut down when you've won. You can continue wandering all over the island to your heart's content. If the scenery were more interesting, that might even be fun. About the best available here is to head for the coast and gaze into distance from the seashore.

Writing Wander was partly an exercise in learning to use OpenGL and ocaml. I think I succeeded at both. I'm pleased that I got something playable at all, given the constraints I was under, let alone something that can actually keep me engaged for a ten minutes at a stretch.

Wander was developed on Linux, specifically, Debian Wheezy on a netbook. It should not strain the graphics capacity of any modern computer. Both ocaml and the OpenGL library I used are available for Windows, so it should be possible to port it to Windows.

Wander was an entry to the Liberated Pixel Cup contest. I didn't expect it to win, and it didn't.

Here's an archive of the source code . Contact me at hendrik@topoi.pooq.com, especially if you want to re-use any of this code. Or if you have ideas for improving it that I might want to entertain.