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Alpha Version released!

We have released the alpha version of "Nikki and the Robots" along with our new website! Finally! You can now play around with Nikki for the first time or try out the level editor. Of course, this is not the final game by any means, but you can get an impression of how "Nikki and the Robots" will feel like in the end.

During the next weeks, we will add many refinements and new features to the game. The auto-updater of "Nikki and the Robots" will take care of this, so that when you start the game, you will always be playing the latest version. We are also busily working on the episodes for the story mode and can hardly wait to show you more about Nikki's adventure.

Until then, you can help us with the development by giving us lots of feedback! Good, bad, bugs, questions, requests, ideas... anything you'd like to tell us! We have set up a bugtracker and a wiki, and we encourage you to make use of them.

UPDATE: We have just released version 0.2.21 for Mac. The game now also works on OS X 10.5 and the input problems with the arrow keys should be fixed.

Tags: nikki, open source, press

This entry was posted on Friday, April 8th, 2011 at 3:22 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

11 Responses to “Alpha Version released!”

JP Moresmau says:

April 8, 2011 at 9:37 pm

Great stuff, thanks for doing that and opening up the alpha. I’ve just looked at the first few tutorials:
- tutorial 1 the first hint text is not fully visible when the windows open
- tutorial 1 I got stuck for a long time trying to grasp how to get over the hurdle after the first three platforms, what you say about wall jumping is not very clear
- tutorial 2 my robots fell upside down, I can’t do anything to turn around again, I have to start the level again?
- tutorial 4 I fell off one of the platform and the fall went on forever… Shouldn’t there be a failure message?

Thanks!
Christian J. says:

April 9, 2011 at 3:46 am

It’s extremely slow on my Compaq NC2400 (dual core Intel U2500 @ 1.2 Ghz, 32 bit, Intel graphics) with Debian stable. Even selecting menu items lags 0.5-1 seconds and gives CPU spikes for 1+ seconds, the game itself updates the pixels of the main character sprite ~twice per second, but the character position only changes once every ~10 seconds (but then a big distance), so it’s unplayable.
cptfuro says:

April 9, 2011 at 9:10 am

@ JP Moresmau: Thanks for the feedback! Let me just give a quick reply:

- The text messages will be handled very differently, we still have to implement that.
- Yes, you are not the only one who thought so. I will think of a better explanation!
- The controls of the jetpack robots have hardly been finetuned at all, yet. But things like that can happen and are also intended to be part of the gameplay. Therefore, in the final game, there will be a checkpoint based restart system.
- Yes, of course. The failure message (which will actually say “failure”) will be implemented soon.

Thanks for trying out the alpha and we hope that you keep following the further developments!
shahn says:

April 9, 2011 at 1:53 pm

@ Christian J.: That’s not good. That sounds like OpenGL is not working (or not available) and Qt is falling back to software rendering. Does your system support OpenGL? (We’ll add OpenGL in the system requirements!)
Daniel Larsson says:

April 9, 2011 at 2:26 pm

On OS X (at least my system) the arrow keys stop working almost immediately, and all I can do is jump up and down on the spot.
Christian J. says:

April 9, 2011 at 4:50 pm

OpenGL hw rendering seems to be available:

$ glxinfo | grep irect
direct rendering: Yes

Also various OpenGL programs including extremetuxracer are working totally fluently, with the exception of tremulous which plays at 2 fps and repeats the sound in choppy form and maxes out 1 core (seems it’s uncapable using multiple cores).
Christian J. says:

April 9, 2011 at 9:47 pm

I’ve figured it out now: the user under which the game runs has to be member of the “video” group. ‘adduser mytestuser video’ made both Tremulous and Nikki run just fine on this laptop (Tremulous with 50-60 fps in fact, and Nikki now only uses ~40% cpu). The reason extremetuxracer worked and tremulous not was just that I ran the former in my main user account but the latter as another user (with the idea to give me some protection from exploits, even though I still can’t run most programs with ’sux –untrusted’ because they need full access to the display, so the protection is rather imaginary).

I especially like the box towers when they tumble and cover a battery and I have to jump around on the boxes to try to move them away :)
Jason K says:

April 9, 2011 at 10:25 pm

Great Job! Normally I don’t enjoy platformer games like this, but with the wall jumping, physics, and robots I played through most of the tutorial levels more than once.

Installation was super smooth, performance excellent (Ubuntu 10.10 x64), and the interface extremely responsive.

I see this as an excellent indie version of Little Big Planet. Keep up the good work and I know you’ll have at least one paying customer :)
Matthias says:

April 10, 2011 at 12:41 am

The videos look fun, but I have to second Daniel: The arrow keys on OSX seem badly broken, almost impossible to walk around while jumping works.
cptfuro says:

April 10, 2011 at 6:11 pm

@Matthias: Yes, sorry about the OSX problem. The game runs pretty nicely on some Macs, while on others there occur those issues. We are already working on fixing that!
Lenny222 says:

April 12, 2011 at 8:41 am

Also a Mac feedback: “Ctrl” for jumping is not such a good idea since Ctrl+Arrow keys switches the virtual desktop on Macs. It’s easy to press both accidentally at the same time while jumping and moving around.