A breath-taking side-scroller focusing on round lifeforms
Project description
Naghni is a simple side-scrolling game. You are a round creature whose purpose is to fill empty holes with matter, thus closing them. It matters greatly to your round friends that you do a job well-done, because if you don’t, they’re all going to die!
If you want to save the naghnies (for that is the name of the people), you should not hesitate to play Naghni. You will be their Saviour, their Hope, their Light in the darkest of times.
Naghni levels consist of you and a lot of other objects. At least one hole is always present. It is your purpose to collect edible objects and then return those objects to the holes. Holes disappear when they have had enough to eat. When all holes are gone, the level has been completed. Holes differ from other objects in that they have borders.
As of now, it’s not possible to die. You may however end up in situations that require a restart.
Naghni is free software under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3 (or any later version). The author of Naghni is Niels Serup, contactable at ns@metanohi.org . This is version 0.1 of the program. Naghni includes program data created by other people and under other free licenses; the details can be found in the file LICENSING.txt.
Installing
Naghni depends on PyGame 1.8.1+ for graphics and sound. To install PyGame, do one of these things:
For Debian etc.: type apt-get install python-pygame
For Fedora etc.: type yum install pygame
Or get it at http://pygame.org/download.shtml
Naghni also depends on pycairo, NumPy and librsvg.
apt-get install python-cairo, or yum install pycairo, or visit http://cairographics.org/pycairo/
apt-get install python-numpy, or yum install python-numpy, or visit http://numpy.scipy.org/
apt-get install python-rsvg, or gnome-python2-rsvg, or http://librsvg.sourceforge.net/
Optional extras
If present, Naghni will also use these Python modules:
- setproctitle
- Web address: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setproctitle/
$ sudo easy_install setproctitle
- termcolor
- Web address: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/termcolor
$ sudo easy_install termcolor
Way #1
Get newest version of Naghni at http://metanohi.org/projects/naghni/
Extract the downloaded file and run this in a terminal:
$ sudo python setup.py install
Way #2
Just run this (requires that you have python-setuptools installed):
$ sudo easy_install naghni
Running
When Naghni has been installed, you can run it from the command-line like this:
$ naghni [options]
naghni has several options. Run naghni --help to see a list of them. Most of them can also be changed in-game.
Playing
All special aspects of Naghni will (ultimately) be explained in-game. Do not worry. Use the arrow keys to control your character, press PageUp/PageDown to zoom in/out and Shift+F to toggle an FPS viewer. Press the R key to restart a level.
For developers
Naghni uses Git for branches. To get the latest branch, get it from gitorious.org like this:
$ git clone git://gitorious.org/naghni/naghni.git
Naghni is written in Python and should be relatively easy to integrate into other programs (in the future, that is).
Designing levels
Levels are simply Python files using the Naghni Python files installed as a mini library. The easy way to create a new level is to modify an existing level. Such levels can be found in the naghnilevels directory within the data directory. No real documentation is present at this time, and the “API” might change in the future.
The future / TODOs
Naghni currently misses several features.
It doesn’t have a menu.
It only works with SDL. Creating bindings to OpenGL might be a good idea.
It has only 3 builtin levels, and all of them are test levels, i.e. they are not hilariously fun to play.
There is no story mode. There is barely any story, anyway.
Characters are boring circles. They should have fancy things on them (like eyes, ears, tentacles, etc.).
It has only 3 builtin patterns. More are needed.
It lacks real background color/image support.
It lacks documentation (and a finalized level “format”).
It lacks music and sounds.
It hasn’t been tested thorougly.
Too few people are playing it.
There are a few physics-related issues which need to be fixed. It would be nice to implement Naghni in a general-purpose physics engine instead of its current fault prone one.
It’s slow. Optimization is sadly a must. The more objects a level has, the slower it is, partly because of slow loops.
Code (especially the more complex stuff) isn’t explained very well.
Probably several other things as well.
It will take time to fix this.
The logo
The logo of Naghni, found in the “logo” directory, is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (or any later version) Unported license. A copy of this license is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
This document has been released under the Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal license.