krank - a little casual game

krank snake, stone, links and anchors

krank is a game of dexterity, being somewhere between Breakout and billiard, where the aim of each level is to shove floating stones towards compatible static stones. You control a short chain of stones with your mouse to achieve that.



While the game's visual and audible aural style is as simple as the rules are, there is no shortage of variety. Different level layouts provide enough challenge and different gameplay elements (the interactions between different types of floating stones with different types of static stones) are introduced at a reasonable paste. If you find the hardness curve too flat or simply don't like one level: the game permits you to skip one level ahead the last finished one.



Another important aspect, which keeps me playing, is the variety of look and sound. Each level has it's own pretty background and there are different sound themes, which give a subtle but very effective feedback of what is happening on the game field.



Thorsten Kohnhorst is the programmer behind krank. He created some other games, which I will introduce in the future. Michael Abbing is the game's sound designer. Nine others contributed to the game's level designs.

The game was written in python and packages are available for Mac OS X, Windows and Ubuntu (thanks to Vadi for the latter!) On other systems you will have to make a little fix to play it. The code and media appears to be in the public domain.



If you ever enjoyed a puzzle, billiard, golf or an arcade game before, you definitely should give it a try. Especially with it being so easy to start playing (see package links above.) By the way: I haven't seen a game menu integrated so well in a game since the unfree Psychonauts! The only feature I'm missing is a save function.



Update: Łukasz Krotowski submitted a patch, which makes the game auto-save on GNU/Linux systems. Now I just have to learn how to use patches. ^^



Have a look at the gameplay in the video below but I must warn you that the sound effects (which I am unable to capture) are an important element of the game and that the video (especially with it's visual quality) is a bad representative of the actual game.




krank gameplay video - pardon the lack of sounds :(

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular

RubyWeekend, but also PyDay

Image
Yesterday the first RubyWeekend ended, which is a two and a half days Ruby game creation competition. The topic was "Pirates Versus Zombies!" Seven contributions were made: kiba's digital piracy parody The CopyPirate [ video ], atiaxi's tbs Port Town [ video ], satoshi's console-based footracer [ video ], jlnr's ZombieSoccarrr [ video ], ippa's Zombie Horde [ video ], jacius' Election Year: Zombies vs. Pirates! [ video ] and trejs' Caribbean Onslaught . The submitted code had to be released under an OSI -approved license and all media under one of the Creative Commons licenses (alternatively public domain for both.) The contest is being hosted on the forums of Rubygame , which is a SDL -based Ruby media library. Most submissions are based on it, some use Gosu . Ninjapix, probably PyDay #2's winner Another competition ended on Saturday: PyDay #2 - a rather fresh 24-hours Python game making contest and the smaller brother of Ludum Dare ,...
Read more

Open Source Game Engines

Image
ScummVM FIFE OpenTTD Today is a game engine special on Free Gamer. These are the projects that take your favourite [old school] titles and provide not only a native port but also fix all the nasties that had you saving and loading or even resetting your PC in the past. I remember the days of autoexec.bat and making every byte of that 640k count. Well these won't give you that fun but at least you get to play your old games! Let's start with the exciting FIFE: Flexible Isometric Fallout-like Engine . Started as an attempt to make a Fallout engine, it is becoming more ambitious and there are even rumours of a FIFE-based game in development. It should be able to run fan-made Fallout mods like the aptly named Fan Made Fallout . I have a pet favourite among RPG engines - GemRB . (I respect the steady progress on a difficult project.) This Infinity Engine emulator aims to be able to run the Baldur's Gate titles and even improve the experience they offer. The development...
Read more

Anticube 2 - a game within a game

Image
So, as I sometimes peruse various forums, the occasional gem pops up. This is one of the best hidden gems in Open Source gaming. Anticube 2 is a map for Tesseract / Cube 2 that is inspired by the game Antichamber and NaissanceE . If you are unfamiliar with those, that means it is an abstract FPS puzzle game where things are not quite what they seem. Or, as the creator Lord Kv probably better explains: Anticube 2 is a puzzle map for Tesseract. You'll find yourself in an interactive, dynamic, non-euclidean world. Supported by 5000+ lines of Cubescript and GLSL code, this map will do things no other Cube 2 / Tesseract map has ever done before. Here is the trailer: There is also a gallery of screenshots for you to check out. I won't include them here because, to be honest, the screenshots won't mean much for this kind of game. I'm calling it a game, even though it is just a map for a game. You can tell it is worth checking out because of the reactions it elicits from...
Read more