BeNibblix

BeNibblix v1.0 - Released 3/6/99 - (C) Copyright 1999
Written by Andrew Bazan (abazan@berbee.com)

BeNibblix is free software -- it is provided with no warrenty whatsoever. If you use this program, you do so AT YOUR OWN RISK. Under no circumstances can the author be held responsible for any harm or damages that result from the use of this program.

Introduction -- What is BeNibblix?

BeNibblix is a rewrite of the classic "Nibbles" game for BeOS R4. In the game, you play a hungry snake, and you have to eat a certain amount of fruit to proceed to the next level. To make things a little more interesting, you grow a little longer with each piece of fruit you eat, and you have to navigate around the levels avoiding your own tail and other obstacles.

How do I play?

Playing the game is extremely simple. When you first run the BeNibblix program, you can either start a new game right away ("New game" from the "Game" pulldown menu) or you can configure a few of the game settings by selecting "Setup" from the "Game" pulldown menu. In the setup menu, the first slider controls the game speed -- if you move the slider to the left, your snake will move more slowly. The second slider controls how many fruits are on the screen at once. The default number of fruits is 2, but you can increase this to 3 to make the game easier, or decrease it to 1 to make the game harder.

Once setup is complete and you have begun a new game, you can use the arrow keys to move your snake around the screen. The object is to eat (run over) the green fruits on the screen -- you need to eat a certain amount to proceed to the next level. There is a status bar on the bottom right half of the screen that grows long as you near your goal -- once the bar is full, you proceed to the next level. At any time in the game, you can press ESC to end the game, or ENTER to pause it (ENTER again will unpause.)

Notes on this version / any known problems?

* This release has 20 levels.
* There are no serious bugs that I know of at this time.

How do I contact the author? What's the license on this program?

First off, BeNibblix is completely free. New versions should always be available via BeWare (from Be.com) or via my website (see below), and future versions will probably all be free as well. If you really feel the need to pay me something, I would appreciate if someone would buy me a SoundPlay R4/Intel license or send me a few bucks so I can purchase it myself -- SoundPlay provides great background music for coding. :) Anyway, _please_ report any bugs/suggestions/flames/comments/etc to abazan@berbee.com. If you want to check out newer versions of BeNibblix, or any other BeOS projects I'm working on, feel free to check out my webpage.

A final note: this is my first "real" BeOS project, and the only reason I'm not releasing the source with it is the source is pretty messy at this point, and I don't want other people learning from my mistakes. I might clean it up in a future release enough to release the source code. If anyone wants to port it to PowerPC, that's completely different -- drop me a line, and I'll send out the current (messy) code.

http://www.mailbag.com/users/abazan/index.html

Thanks for playing BeNibblix!