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[Show comments] [Show snapshots] [Show videos] [Show content] [Replace file] Nikwi Deluxe ============ 0. Contents ----------- 1. About 1.1. About Slashstone 2. Compiling 3. Running 1. About -------- Nikwi is a 2D platform game i wrote and released to the unsuspecting world in December 2005. After that the world remained unsuspected as if nothing had happened, until a year later when i released Nikwi Deluxe. Again, nothing has changed for the world much, until a while later the game was picked up by an unofficial Ubuntu repository and after that the official Debian repository. Still, the world remained unsuspected at large. So now, about seven years after the original game's release, i re-release the game yet again - this time on GitHub with a new licence: zlib. Based on previous experience, i can foresee that the world will still not notice. Nikwi (before the Deluxe version) was my first commercial (shareware) game. At the time the word "indie" wasn't yet widely known and nobody paid really any attention to platform games (yes, there was such a time!). In fact when i released and announced it in a game development forum (the only place i knew that had anything to do about indie games in general) there were comments about how it isn't a puzzle or casual game. At that time the casual scene was still in the hands of small developers, it was exploding fast and if you weren't making a casual game, you were doing it wrong - aparently i did it wrong since Nikwi never had a single sale :-). So a year later i decided to release Nikwi as open source (and practically forget about it). I fixed a couple of bugs, made a couple of levels slightly easier and made the "deluxe" version. At the time i was still under the impression that open source should be GPL, so i sticked GPL to the code and released it on the Internet. I submitted it to Happy Penguin (the Linux game tome or somethinglike that), got some nice commens, saw it being ported to PSP at some point later, etc. These days while i was looking on my previous PC's hard disk, i found the source code of Nikwi, so i decided to clean it up and relicense it under the license i prefer these days - zlib. This release isn't any different from the original Nikwi Deluxe release. The only thing i changed is the build process that now relies on a single Makefile instead of a custom preprocessor that i had written at the time and a single bug fix i found while running the game under Valgrind - just in case (although i never saw that bug to actually occur). Also this time the source release contains all the needed sources and "source" data files since none of the libraries i used for Nikwi are developed any more. The game took about three weeks to write. The earliest post i can find on the Internet about the game was for a second alpha version i released in November 28, 2005 and the game was released in December 15, 2005 (so that would be 15 days). Before the second Alpha, i was working on it for about 3-4 days and i made a patch the next day of the release (there was a sound glitch), so rounded up it was three weeks of development. The development was *very* intense - for personal reasons, i had to finish the game as fast as i could. Most of the days i slept for only like 6 hours and worked on the game for the rest of the time almost non-stop (pausing only to eat). At the last "day", i was away for about 30 hours after 5 hours of sleep. While this isn't something i really want to repeat, i can say that i liked the experience - i just wish i could take it easier at the time and fix a couple of issues the game had. But that was my lesson that rushing something is rarely a good idea :-). Having said that, i think the game was good considering the circumstances. 1.1. About Slashstone ---------------- Slashstone was the name i used at the time for my game and program releases in a similar way to Runtime Legend of today. Unfortunately, like the rest of my domain names, slashstone.com was snatched away when due to a health issue i couldn't pay for my domain names and cybersquatters registered them almost instantly. Please ignore the references to slashstone.com and Slashstone in the game and use runtimelegend.com instead. 2. Compiling ------------ To compile the game you need GNU Make, SDL 1.2 development libraries and a UNIX environment (MSYS under Windows is fine). Simply go to the root directory of the source code release and type: make This will build the program and the data files. To clean the source tree type: make clean There isn't a make install/uninstall at the moment. You need to run the game from its directory. The Debian maintainers made some modifications to the code to make the game be able to "spread out" to the whole system in a UNIX-y fashion, but since i wanted to change the license, i decided to avoid their patches. I may reimplement the patches at some point. Note that if you want to work on the data files, you need to make sure that the justdata.up file is not built. Type: make nikwi to only make the program and skip the justdata.up file. 3. Running ---------- Nikwi Deluxe needs the data files at the current directory. It looks in the justdata.up file for the data files (justdata.up is a package file that was originally used by a 3D game engine i was working at the time - the up extension means "Undead Package" because the engine was named "Undead Engine") and if the justdata.up file does not exist, it looks in the data directory. The justdata.up file is generated using the upack tool which can be found in the src/tools directory. By default Nikwi Deluxe runs in windowed mode, but it can be made to run in fullscreen mode by adding the --fullscreen argument, like: nikwi --fullscreen Under Windows it is recommended to use a shortcut that adds the argument. For information on playing the game, see the manual. Kostas "Bad Sector" Michalopoulos badsectoracula()gmail.com badsector()runtimelegend.com |
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