I have been offline for most of the past month, so I have only just got around to noting the news about Kye. This site has been getting quite a few hits due to being mentioned in the OLPC news: Kye has been ported to the OLPC.

Kye might well be a very appropriate game for the OLPC, in fact; it's an innocuous child-friendly game, simple to learn but, depending on the levels you play, can be very challenging. And it seems in keeping with the intent of the original Kye (where the registration money went to Save the Children).

Mind you, the laptop will have to have a durable mouse if it is to survive kids playing RUNNER :-).

Coincidentally, it appears that the port was done by Chris Ball, who used to work with me at Netcraft.

More minor fixes in this release. The main fix here is for the wall auto-rounding option in the editor, which did not work correctly in 0.9.2. Also, the .desktop files in the RPM were not compliant with the most recent Linux desktop specification, so I have made some corrections to those. Apart from those 2 changes, the rest is minor code cleanups. Get it here.

A stable 1.0 release should be close (hmm, I think I said this before...).

It is good to see that Python Kye is getting some attention; because I get precious little feedback about it. I never know how to read this - most feedback you get about open source projects is when someone finds a bug or wants something changed, so it can mean that it is "just working" for people; or it can mean that nobody managed to get it running.

Linux Format seem to like it though, as they gave a half-page write-up of Python Kye in their "HotPicks" section in issue 88 (Jan 2007). They seem to have understood the idea of Kye as a cross between Boulderdash and Sokoban, which is roughly how I characterised it for the description on Freshmeat.

I need to pick up the development again and get a version 1.0 released — I should be only two or three releases away from being able to declare it stable.

This release is mostly about code cleanup. I think all the major code commenting & reorganisation that I have wanted to do is now complete, so I should have only minor changes to make before I make the first stable release. 1.0 is not far away now.

This release fixes some problems with the game recording feature. And I have rewritten the status bar, so that the hint text is now displayed in a tooltip if it is too long to fit in the normal display.

Available here.

Mattias Drochner wrote to let me know that NetBSD has had a package of Kye for some time.

João Pinto has created an unofficial package of Kye suitable for Ubuntu 6.06, available here.

This release does not contain much new from the user's point of view. I have been improving the error handling in several areas, so file and permissions errors should be less likely to result in a crashed interface; common problems like images.tar.gz being inaccessible should result in error messages in a dialog box now. The lack of other changes needed is partly due to getting little feedback, as you would expect for a pre-v1 version of a game few people know of, and there being few bugs to fix.

Internally, I have been doing a lot of cleaning up of the code: I learned python from a python-1.5 reference book that I bought from a remainders bookshop some years ago, so I have been using a lot of rather… old python idioms. So I have been doing a lot of code refactoring to make it a bit more modern and readable. There is still more to do here; on the bright side, given the lack of any other bugs, I should be ready to do a v1.0 when the code clean-up is done.

The new version is available from the python Kye page.

This release makes few changes, despite the time lapse from 0.8 — which hopefully is a good sign for doing 1.0 as the next release. We will see. The main change in this version is another attempt to improve the keyboard input: the Kye doesn't move continuously as soon as you press a key, but waits a moment after doing the first move (rather like a normal keyboard repeat delay); hopefully this cuts down on the number of involuntary double-moves. You can hold SHIFT down to get an immediate continuous move. I am not a big keyboard user in Kye myself, so I hope people who are will tell me if this is an improvement or not.

This release also fixes a few problems with recordings. You can get 0.9 from the python Kye page.

I'm getting close to doing a 1.0 release now. Version 0.8 makes a few small but important changes. I have fixed a bug in the behaviour relative to the (original Windows) Kye v2: the starting alignment of shooters was wrong (shooters in a row are at different angles, but shooters in a column should be all at the same angle). Also, like the original Kye, if there is no Kye in the level then the game adds one automatically at (3,3) (for example LEVEL MIX1 from AntKye2.kye).

This version also remembers the window size that you like to use. Get it from the Python Kye page.

I have also rereleased my set of levels System. It is now compatible with the Windows version of Kye (oops!), and I have fixed the only-too-obvious bugs in Trackway 2, and added another level.

I have also added a new set of levels called Mystical. These are some experimental levels that I wrote while investigating some of the weirder properties of the game - these will require some rather detailed knowledge of how the game works to complete. Don't waste your time on these unless you really want a challenge and have time to work out the tricks!

I have added a new set of Kye levels. Mystical.kye are some very hard levels, which I have created to demonstrate/exploit some of the more unusual features of the game. Only people with a really detailed knowledge of the game will be able to complete these, I think. Not for beginners.

This release adds a lot of features and improvements. The keyboard input should be better now, as it tries to allow for multiple keys being pressed at once. We will see if people find the feel of this better. You also now have access to diagonal movement using the numeric keypad, which was not possible before. The interface should be closer to the Gnome/gtk standard feel now.

This version remembers recently played files, and remembers levels that you have already reached in the Goto Level dialog. And you can now record Kye games: this is experimental, and I certainly don't guarantee that recordings with this release will play back in future releases. It is probably useful mostly for me to answer people's questions about levels.

Finally, I have decided to impose the same rule as the Windows version of Kye, that the border of levels must be solid walls. I think this is simpler, as even I was forgetting this rule when designing levels; so some of the levels that I released were not compatible with the Windows version of Kye. It's a shame, but for the moment it's more useful for us to interoperate with the Windows version.

The new release is available from the Python Kye page.

Explaining how to complete a Kye level is very hard work, I have found.

Fortunately I have just reimplemented a neat feature that I had in my first port of Kye (a Java version that I played with for a while): recordings. Version 0.7 will be able to record and play back games (it just stores per-gametick movement — I got the idea from Doom, of course). So I will be able to put up demos of all the introductory levels; hopefully this will help people get started.

I have fixed the keyboard problems, which seem to be the main complaint about 0.5.0. Also I have ditched the final .0 of the version number, as I don't expect to take that long to reach 1.0 now :-). This release also works once again with pygtk 2.4.x, and I have an RPM package available now too (partly based on Viktor Kerkez's package for Atomix).

The new release is available from the Python Kye page.

Also, I notice that there is yet another Kye clone sprung up on sourceforge: Xye. It looks more like a derivative than a clone, though, as it is not fully compatible, but instead has lots of new objects added to the game. No level editor yet though, and while you can convert Kye levels to its new level format, they won't necessarily work. And it is Windows-only for now.

I just came across our entry in the Linux Game Tome. Feedback so far seems to be positive, except for some problems with the keyboard controls. I hardly ever use the keyboard, so I had not noticed this before; I have now fixed this problem for the next release (just a gtk-ism that I had not allowed for).

Kye version 0.5.0 is now available. This version adds the animation of the diamonds, which was present in the original game, but had been absent in my version. Having the diamonds glitter makes them a more compelling goal, I think :-).

I have also continued with major work on the level editor. The menus are greatly improved now, with menu items enabled/disabled appropriately in different situations. There is now an undo feature, which is useful to know when making big edits (albeit quite crude at the moment). The editor now does basic checks on the levels when saving, which should help beginners avoid forgot-to-place-the-Kye errors.

I have also started a mailing list, to (hopefully) kick-start some discussion about good levels to play, level creation ideas, etc.