News You Can Bruise

I wrote a thirty-minute talk for the Roguelike Celebration about good old robotfindskitten. Then I saw that I only had a fifteen-minute timeslot to deliver my talk, and I cut it way, way down. As you might expect, that made the talk a lot better; what had started out as a kinda rambling history was boiled down into an exploration of what it means for a game to be good.

Here's my transcript of the talk as prepared for delivery: Behold, mortal, the origins of robotfindskitten...

I went through a lot of archival material to write this talk and I was planning on putting a bunch of the stuff I cut in this blog post, but... I'm pretty happy with the talk as is and there's only a couple pieces of extra material I feel a strong need to share with you.

First, I put up the original DOS binaries and all the source code I could find for the very first version of robotfindskitten, from 1997. I also included the C++ source code for a student project I did a couple months before rfk, which really looks like a dry run for rfk, both in terms of the subject matter and the code.

Second, I just wanted to highlight the message I wrote in the docs for the 1999 Linux release of rfk: "I like this program a lot. It's fun without being violent."

Third, this sequence of Nethack-related files I had on my BBS (which I ran from 1993 to 1996). This was useful for establishing when I obtained Nethack 3.1.1, a factoid which itself turned out not to be very interesting.

SPOILER.ZIP  Size:    22,125 | A complete walkthrough of Nethack! Very
Date: 01/31/94  DL's:      1 | handy!

HACK311.ZIP  Size:   749,285 | Nethack! The biggest, most feature-packed
Date: 03/01/94  DL's:     14 | Rogue clone ever!

NETSPOIL.ZIP Size:   129,059 | New versions of the Nethack Spoilers!
Date: 10/27/95  DL's:      7 | Everything you need to know.

NHDECODE.ZIP Size:     4,294 | A handy thing that translates the rumor &
Date: 11/09/95  DL's:      1 | oracle files for Nethack.

I called roguelikes "Rogue clones" back then. (A bit later, I uploaded a copy of Angband and described it as a "Nethack clone".)

Bizarrely, the description file inside SPOILER.ZIP says "A complete walkthrough of Netrunner! Very handy!" They are Nethack spoilers, though. Maybe my co-sysop Andy wrote that description and had Cyberpunk 2020 on his mind.

It's a big day for announcements. There's a new "Mayan Apocalypse" version of robotfindskitten, due largely to to the work of new dev team member Eric S. Raymond.

My major contribution to the release was editorial. I consolidated the list of NKIs with lists produced for other ports (notably Dave Griffith's Frotz port). I removed some stupid fifteen-year-old jokes, and added new stupid jokes. The end result is that this version of rfk ships with 701 high-quality NKIs, versus about 400 NKIs of wildly varying quality.

Two more exciting bits of rfk news bring life to this seemingly-abandoned weblog. First, you can now get prints of Beth Lerman's rfk painting! You can order a print online at Imagekind, where everything is 20% off until Friday, according to the big banner at the top of every page. Also of interest to NYCB readers: Beth's Magritte 95 painting and... most of her prints, actually.

If you live in the SF bay area, you can also buy the prints in person. Bay Homes and Linens in San Mateo stocks prints that have been color-corrected by the artist.

Second, I discovered another robotfindskittenlike game via clickolinko: Don't Find The Kitty. It's the anti-rfk, in which you lose when you find the kitten. I haven't played it, so I'm not sure if it's possible to not lose.

Two exciting pieces of news from the long-dormant world of kittens and the robots who find them. First, Star Simpson has ported rfk to jQuery, proving that robotfindskitten remains relevant in today's world of Javascript frameworks.

Second, as you can see on the right, Beth Lerman painted a robotfindskitten still life! Here's a better picture on Beth's art site.

The still life has been in progress for a while. Beth and I collaborated to find NKIs that would work well in a still life:

• A lotus. You make an interesting pair.
• A frosted pink party-cake, half eaten.
• A punch bowl, filled with punch and lemon slices.

(Punch bowl and punch not pictured.)

Beth presented me with the finished painting Monday night in a gala unveiling at my apartment, and it's now being classy in the living room. Speaking of classy, be sure to visit Beth's Etsy store.

For a school project, Aapo Rantalainen ported robotfindskitten to a robot made of LEGO. In a very steampunk fashion you turn huge dials to move robot.

Tired of finding kitten? In Robot Wants Kitty, kitten is dangled just out of your reach for the whole game. And since there's a power-up early on that makes precision movement pretty much impossible, I never found kitten. On the plus side, hey, it's another robotfindskittenlike game.

My obsessions collide with Thomas Thurman's Gopher implementation of robotfindskitten. There's also a cool "Awesome Dinosaurs" thing happening that I'll mention in a non-teaser way when it happens.

Recently the Triborough bridge near my house was renamed the RFK Bridge. I thought that was kind of an extreme way to honor robotfindskitten, but I wasn't consulted. I would have settled for giving robot the key to the city (which it would have ignored).

But the most appropriate way to honor robotfindskitten is to make robotfindskittenlike games. Such as the rather gruesome The Favored.

Recently under Adam P.'s guidance I bought a Nintendo DS. It's proven its worth on long trips already. Not under Adam P.'s guidance I bought a little plugin card that lets me run homebrew DS software, like robotfindskitten! Way to go, Trevor Wilson!

Just so I don't leave NYCB alone all night with that depressing entry at top, check this out. The PSP game Secret Agent Clank includes a robotfindskitten minigame. Thanks, Gerard Green of High Impact Games. You can also check out some new ports including a 68k Mac one.

Incidentally, once again, the official name of the game is robotfindskitten, not Robot Finds Kitten. Just thought you should know. And by "know" I mean "submit to my will".

Recently I discovered another robotfindskittenlike game: Space Kitteh. It's like a 2D Flash version of Super Mario Galaxy. Also this GameMaker remake, which isn't on the list.