This game was created to demonstrate the kinds of projects students can build in CS 300 at Brigham Young University–Hawaii.

In this game, you assume the role of Tux the Linux Penguin. Help Tux explore an enchanted house, meet its eccentric occupants, and recover four lost treasures!

THIRSTY NELLAN traces its roots to a public domain text-adventure game called Nellan is Thirsty, by Dr. Furman H. Smith. It first appeared in the July/August 1980 issue of Recreational Computing magazine as sample code for aspiring programmers. Although originally written for the TRS-80 computer, the game was ported shortly thereafter to the Commodore 64, where it was widely distributed.

I discovered the game in the late 1980's, and I thought it was pretty neat. In the early 2000's, I felt a sting of sadness as I realized that future generations would likely never see this game — first, because the C-64 is a dead platform, and secondly because modern gamers rarely have the patience for text adventures anyway.

So gradually the idea came to me to completely re-write the game as a graphical adventure for modern computers, with color and sound and a point-n-click interface. I've actually implemented the game twice. My first version, written in C++ between 2001 and 2003, is for desktop PCs, both Windows and Linux. The Linux port of the game was the subject of a very nice article in Linux Journal, in October 2003. About ten years later, I rewrote the game in Java for Android devices. In addition, the Android version features a French language track that is not available in the PC version.

You may also want to try out an alternative implementation of the game, written by Cat Gray in Python, using the PyGame library.