River Nibbler v. 1.1
"Nibbles gone for a swim"

by Kenneth C. Arnold (grade 9)
   kcarnold@yahoo.com

You are Nibbles the snake (ex-DOS users can remember QBASIC Nibbles). Get the +, avoid the rock. Simple, huh? Well what if they are carried by the current of a river towards a waterfall? Yeah, falling off of the waterfall hurts. So does swimming too far upriver or bumping into the shore. Don't worry -- it's easy. So don't play it at Easy.

Notes:

There is now a Custom difficulty mode, which allows you to create your own level of difficulty. Some things might not be obvious:

 Difficulty level - 1 to 4, 3 disables precision mode. Just corresponds to the levels (Easy, Medium, Tough, Frustrating).
 x movement rate - how fast Nibbles can swim sideways
 y movement rate - how fast Nibbles can swim up/downriver
 Snake downriver rate - How much the current pushes our snake
 Rock downriver rate - ditto for the floating boulder
 Good downriver rate - (Good [thing] = '+')

Intersection detection is a big wierd. The internal sizes of the objects do not match what you think that they should be by looking at them.

I am a horrid artist. Someone please fix up my pics. If you change the sizes, either find the location in the program (near the beginning) where the sizes of the objects are defined (abbreviations are Snake, Good (for lack of a better name), and Rock.) For the background field, make it look like a river. The program uses XorPic for its updates, so if an object overwrites part of your picture, it'll come back after the object moves. (The bank really needs help.)

This program and all associated materials are (c) 1999-2000 by Kenneth C. Arnold. It is distributed under the GNU public licence (GPL), which can be found at the GNU website, http://gnu.org.

Just 'cuz it's free and open-source doesn't mean that it's yours. Claiming that other people's code is your own is not cool.

If you are interested in checking out (and laughing at) my under-construction website, go to http://geocities.com/kcarnold/.

Keys:

<up>, <down>, <left>, <right> - hmmm... let's think about this...
ESC - quit
APPS - pause
2nd - precision mode. Press this before/while pressing an arrow key and the snake will move at half-speed. You will find one notable exception.

Version History:

1.1 - 1/10/00
 Added pause feature (APPS key)
 Option to play again or quit when game over
 Added Custom level option
 Now restores Custom menus to defaults
  - This makes the program quite a bit bigger. If you want to save space, find the big Custom:...:EndCustom section near the beginning of the program (it's very noticable) and clear the whole line. If you know of a less bloated way of restoring the Custom menu, e-mail me. Note that a toolbar would work, but it would clear itself if any of the F keys were pressed during the game.
 Minor changes to info screen

1.0 - 1/9/00
 Initial public release

Todo for next version (* = you can help me here)
* Improve graphics
* Speed up each iteration
* Fix intersection messiness
   (If it doesn't slow it down too much, I'll fix a problem you _will_ notice in the Tough mode.)
  Lives
  Levels
  De-bloat 
   (removing comments would do this, but comments are good)
   (split into commented and non-commented versions?)
  Speed up

Disclaimer: 

The level names are misnomers. Don't get angry. Remember, it's open-source, so you can change it all you please (just e-mail whatever you changed to me if it's any good).

THIS PROGRAM HAS NO WARRANTY AT ALL. USE IT AT YOUR OWN RISK. IF IT MAKES YOUR HOUSE BLOW UP, IT'S NOT MY FAULT.

PS - If you want this program in any other form (i.e., tar.gz, tar.bz2, GtkTiLink, ASCII text, or whatever, just e-mail me.