I’m Mathias, a new contributor to KDE Games. During the last year I spent some time to code on Granatier, a new game which will be released with KDE SC 4.4 and I would like to give a short introduction.

At first, what is Granatier? It is a Clanbomber clone which in turn is a Bomberman clone. If you played Clanbomber, you may have noticed that it is no longer maintained and at least Kubuntu doesn’t ship it since Dapper Drake. A few friends and me used to play it quite often, so I took a look at the source code, but it was hard to understand, at least for me. As I already wanted to improve my C++ and Qt knowledge for some time, this was the right opportunity to do both. I didn’t start from scratch, but used the Kapman codebase, so kudos to the Kapman delvelopers, without them, it would have took much longer to get to the current state. I also have to thank Arturo Silva, who did the marvelous artwork.

You might wonder where the name comes from. Well it’s german and it’s an old expression for a soldier who throws grenades (german: Granaten), just like the musketeer (german: Musketier) who uses muskets.

So what’s the current state of the game? Well, I think I managed to implement everything from Clanbomber except the AI. The default Clanbomber maps are also included. Additionally, it is possible to import self made maps.

Here is a short screencast, but keep in mind, I suck at playing simultaneously with two player

Link to ogv

At the moment KAL from the Gluon project is used for sound output. The problem is, Gluon is not yet released. If KAL is not found, Phonon will be used as fallback. The problem with Phonon is, it’s not made for this use case. It’s great if you just want to play sound, but it gets difficult if you consecutively start and stop sound within milliseconds. So if there are for example many explosions, it’s possible, that not for every explosion a sound is played. After Gluon is released, just ask your distribution to package Gluon and rebuild Granatier.

After the release I want add the possibility to play games over network. I hope to succeed in the network game, because it is one of the main reasons I started with Granatier.

That’s it. Have fun with the game.