Black Penguin - Game for Linux
Copyright (C) 1999 Holger Priebs, pengu@priebs.de
Holger Priebs
Hasselkamp 39
D - 24119 Kronshagen / Germany
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
0. Compiling
1. Installing the Game
2. Playing the Game
3. Contacting the author
4. Misc.
0. Compiling Black Penguin
If you would just like to play the game right away, there's an ELF binary included in the src directory for your convenience. If this is what you want, please go on reading under 1. 'Installing the Game'. In order to compile Black Penguin, you'll need Qt 1.40 and tmake installed on your system which are available from Trolltech <http://www.troll.no>. Be sure you have installed the software development package in addition to the runtime libraries. Type 'make' in the src directory. You'll probably get a bunch of warning messages by the compiler complaining about missing const declarations. You can safely ignore these.
- Installing the Game
In the src directory you'll find a binary called 'blackpenguin'. Just copy or move the binary to a location like /usr/local/games where all users of your system have access to it. You need not copy any additional files, all you need to run the game is the 'blackpenguin' file and properly set up Qt libraries. If you are running KDE, you'll already have these libraries. Black Penguin is not a KDE application, though. Every user who plays a game and saves it will have a .blackpenguin file in his/her home directory. If a user defined key assignment is chosen, a .blackpenguinkeys file is stored there as well.
2. Playing the Game
Once you have launched Black Penguin, you'll notice an empty playing field.
Pressing F2 at any time will start a new game. The first level is for
practicing, so try to move around the penguin without jumping off the
playing field. Use your keyboard's cursor keys.
If you prefer different keys, you can chose 'Configure Keys' from the file
menu. Klick on any of the four direction buttons in the 'Configure Keys'
dialog and then press the desired button. Playing is quite easy when you
imagine you're looking at the playing field from the left side. Hit the keys
once for every step you want to move. Holding down the keys is not a good
idea. You lose one life if you jump off the playing field.
By moving around you'll watch the items disappear from those fields that
you already visited. Once you've collected all the items, i.e.
there's no one left, the game will proceed to the next level.
On the upper right of the application's main window you can watch
your credits, how many 'lives' you have left and the current level.
In some levels the items are changing after the penguin has touched them -
you have to visit all playing fields twice in these cases.
The Evil Window tries to catch the Black Penguin - you'll have to be
quick to escape! Try to study the Evil Windos's behaviour and develop your
strategy.
In some levels there are bombs on the playing field - don't touch them!
Needless to say that some levels are really hard to go through - at the
beginning of a difficult level you can save your game by pressing F4 and try
again later on by hitting F3. Black Penguin only saves one game at a time.
If you have gone through all levels or if there's no life left, you'll get a
message on the screen and the game will be over.
Play another game by hitting F2 or close the application by Ctrl+Q.
There's no highscore list (yet).
3. Contacting the author
If you have any comments, suggestions, questions, bug reports or if you would like to contribute to the further development of the game, you can contact the author via eMail.
4. Misc.
Although Black Penguin was written from scratch and does not intend to
be another game's clone either, you can easily see that there's much
similarity to one of the 80's most famous arcade games named QBert.
Thanks to the inventors of QBert, Warren Davis and David Thiel, for
giving the author the inspiration for this game.
Also many thanks to the makers of Qt, a fantastic C++ GUI library that
makes X11 programming so much easier.
Thanks to Olaf Hartig <O.Hartig@keh-berlin.de> who added the key configuration.