Kye 0.9.4
=========

This is a clone of the game Kye for Windows, originally by Colin Garbutt. It
is a puzzle game, which is a little like the old falling-rocks puzzle games,
and perhaps also inspired a little by Sokoban. But Kye has more variety of
objects, and so is capable of posing quite complex puzzles.

This clone is written by Colin Phipps <cph@moria.org.uk> in Python and uses gtk
- so basically it will run on most modern Linux systems easily enough. And you
could probably run it on almost anything to which pygtk has been ported, but I
have only tried Linux and FreeBSD myself. Just make sure you have installed gtk
and pygtk version 2.4 or greater:

for Debian or Ubuntu: apt-get install python-gtk2 librsvg2-common
for FreeBSD: portinstall py24-gtk librsvg2

To install Kye, run ./setup.py install ; Kye should then be in your path (on
Debian-like system, you may have to install python2.4-dev for this to work).
Or you can just run it from the extracted tarball, with ./Kye.

I won't bother describing the game in great detail here - learn by playing. You
are "Kye", the green blob. Move by point-and-click, or using the cursor keys -
you can use the numeric keypad too, and you can move diagonally. Holding a key
down causes you to move continuously, after a delay; hold SHIFT down first to
suppress the delay.

You have to collect the diamonds. You have 3 lives (shown in the status bar)
and you lose a life whenever you come into contact with a monster. Blocks with
arrows on are sliders (square) or rockies (round) which (in the direction of
the arrow) move until then run up against an obstacle. The other common objects
are the brown/yellow blocks, which are just inanimate blocks that you can push
around, and the sentries, which are the yellow pointed-square marching things
that can also push stuff around. It's easiest to learn the game by playing some
easier levels - it loads intro.kye by default when it is run, and this gives a
few easy levels to get you into the swing of things.

To use Kye, you have to have a set of images. I have included a set of images
which I have designed, which are done as SVG so they work better at larger
screen sizes. My images are open-source like Python Kye itself, whereas the
original game images are owned by Colin Garbutt, which is why I don't
distribute those as part of this package - if you prefer to use the original
game images, you can download the alternative images.tar.gz from my website,
and replace the images.tar.gz in this directory (or, if you have already
installed Python Kye, drop them in either /usr/local/share/kye/ or
/usr/share/kye, or just in the directory where you run Kye.

Once you understand the basics, you can go looking for some more challenging
levels to play. There are more levels on my site at
<http://games.moria.org.uk/kye/mylevels> ;
there are many levels available from sites listed in
<http://dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Puzzle/Mazes/Shareware/Kye/> ;
and the levels distributed with the original Kye game are available at:
<http://www.classicgaming.com/kye/registration.htm>

This version of Kye is Copyright (C) 2004-2007 Colin Phipps <cph@moria.org.uk>.
It is made available under the GNU General Public License (see the file COPYING
for details). Furthermore, as the game idea comes from the original Kye game,
to maintain the spirit of the original distribution rules, Kye is charityware -
if you enjoy playing Kye, you are encouraged to donate to a children's charity
(Save the Children was the beneficiary of the original Kye, but the NSPCC, or
whatever equivalent charities are available in your own country, will do just
as well).

You can write your own levels for Kye. Run Kye-edit to use the included level
editor. See http://games.moria.org.uk/kye/pygtk#editing for further
instructions.

Authors & Acknowlegements
-------------------------

Python Kye and the supplied levels & graphics are written by Colin Phipps
<cph@moria.org.uk>. Python Kye is Copyright (c) 2004, 2005, 2006 by Colin
Phipps <cph@moria.org.uk>; it is distributed under the GNU General Public 
License, see COPYING for details.

It is modelled on the original Kye for Windows by Colin Garbutt.

Thanks also to:

<vexorian@gmail.com>
  for useful feedback, and information about the original Kye

Viktor Kerkez <alef@atomixlinux.org>
  for the basis of the RPM spec file, & I have incorporated some of his patches.
