Kiki always reminds me of a friend I know since childhood who somehow got stuck with the nickname kiki. 🙂
Anyway, kiki the nanobot is not to be confused with my friend. It is an open source 3d puzzle game, or like the author states: “basically a mixture of the games Sokoban and Kula-World“. A colleague recommended me to try it out. I was a bit reluctant as it didn’t seem to support linux, only windows and mac were mentioned on the website. Which was quite awkward as it seemed to use python and sdl.
So today I decided to find out the truth about kiki and checked out the cvs head. 🙂 I was delighted to find a linux subdir with a readme, yes, there were even makefiles! I installed the prerequisites (dev packages for python, sdl, sdl_image, sdl_mixer) and was ready to go! I did have to adjust a makefile to point to the right python headers (why not use the general /usr/lib/python instead of /usr/lib/pythonX.X?) Then, everything built just fine. Kiki’s core is in C++, levels and configurable parts are written in Python, bridged using SWIG.
Kiki the nanobot seems like a great puzzle game although it could use some polishing here and there, but given its age (6 years!) and the timeframe in which it was developed (3 months, for a contest), I think it’s quite an achievement. 🙂 You can read a dev post-mortem here.
