Authors: Migael Strydom Timothy Stranex

This game was completed by the authors as a project for the CSC2002S course at the University of Cape Town in 2006. We are now releasing it under the Apache 2.0 license.

"Save the Haggis" is a turn-based computer game in 3D where the player sets off on a quest to destroy a mythical creature called a Haggis. The game is called "Save the Haggis" as opposed to "Destroy the Haggis" because of an ironic plot development in the game. According to the in-game story in the introduction of the game, a country that had been eating Haggis for generations had finally agreed to honoring the rights of the Haggis not to be eaten, and were in the process of a political move to outlaw the eating of Haggis. The aim of the hero in this game is to undermine this whole "Save the Haggis" campaign.

The gameplay takes place in a maze. The game is turn-based, alternating between the hero's turn and the Haggis' turn. During the hero's turn, the user can choose to move the hero to an adjacent cell in the maze (that is, take a single step), jump over several intermediate cells to get to a cell that is not adjacent, throw a grenade, use a psychic ability, or do nothing for the turn. Each of these moves can be useful in overcoming obstacles in the maze, discovering obstacles in the maze, or cunning tactics to defeat the Haggis. During the Haggis' turn, it also has the option of any of the actions the hero can do, and the program will decide what it is that the Haggis does to avoid being defeated.

The hero has certain attributes. These attributes include health, energy and ammunition. When the hero runs out of health or energy, the haggis wins the game. The amount of ammunition is the number of grenades the hero can throw. Every time the hero takes a step, he loses a bit of energy, but not as much as when the hero jumps to a new cell. Health is lost when the hero gets injured by the Haggis, which is when the Haggis throws a grenade at the hero, or when the hero steps on a cell that contains a trap. The Haggis also has these attributes and the same rules apply to it.

The maze consists of cells, some containing items and some containing a wall. The hero and the Haggis each need to be occupying exactly one of the cells at any one time, with the only conditions being that neither the hero nor the Haggis can occupy a cell containing a wall, and they cannot occupy the same cell. Some cells also contain items. When the hero steps on a cell that contains an item, the effect of that item gets played out on the hero. Items basically only alter the attributes of the hero in some way. There are health items to increase the hero's health, and traps that decrease it. There are also energy items to increase the hero's energy and ammunition crates that increase the number of grenades the hero is carrying. The Haggis can also pick up items on a cell.

The object of the game, with all these rules in place, is to attempt to kill the Haggis by making either its health or its energy drop to zero, while not being killed by the Haggis or traps in the maze first. Once this goal has been achieved, the game will be over.

• Linux/FreeBSD
• An OpenGL capable graphics card
• SDL
• Pentium 4 or equivalent or higher
• 256MB RAM

cd build ./haggis (runs the game) ./haggis --test (runs the unit tests) cd doc ls (the documentation in .pdf format)

Dependencies:

• OpenGL
• libSDL
• SDL_image
• CppUnit

You can build the whole project by typing "make". This will build both the documentation and the program and put them in the build directory. To build the documentation, you need

• LaTeX;
• epstopdf; and,
• python. To build the program, you need
• libSDL;
• SDL_image;
• OpenGL; and,
• CppUnit. You may need to edit src/Makefile and src/test/Makefile to add include and library paths for CppUnit. You can build just the source by typing "make" in the src/ directory. (In that case, the build output is in the src/ directory instead of the build/ directory.)

build/ Build output directory build/haggis The game binary build/doc/ Documentation in .pdf format build/images/ Images needed by the game build/test/ Test data needed by the unit tests

src/ The source code and data src/game/ Source code for the game src/test/ Unit testing code and data src/images/ Images needed for the game src/level1.hag The level file