Most of you probably doesn't heard about this game, developed by a Czech
company called Napoleon Games, and first released for DOS in 1998. It's a
old-school type of a dungeon crawler resembling games like Stonekeep, or
Legend of Grimrock. It's the second most downloaded RPG (after Diablo) in the
Czech Republic, and one of my favourite game (I still have the boxed version
in my showcase :^)
A little bit of history
After the initial release, and a smaller re-release two years later, the game
was ported in 2005 on MS Windows by one of the original developers. In 2007
it was re-released as freeware, and in the next year, the source code was
opened up, and released on SourceForge under the GNU General Public License,
version 3.0. Later that year, one of the fans started working on a GNU/Linux
port and eventually succeeded to make the game working in 2009. Since then, a
lot of bugs was fixed and the game is now pretty stable. The last update to
this port is dated from March 2011. In 2014, after a successful campain on
Startovač (a Kickstarter equivalent in Czech Republic), an Android port was
made available by the main developer of the game. This port doesn't have the
source released.
During the development, the game also had an English version, but it was
lost, and since then only the dialogs were recovered, and included in the
English translation which was never fully finished.
Meantime…
When I discovered this year that the game was liberated, I made an effort to
bring this piece of gaming history to a wider audience by documenting the
building and setup process, and already played through the half of the game
to check its playability. Currently I'm also in contact with the developer of
the port to solve the remaining issues.
Anybody can help just by playing the game, and reporting problems on the bug
tracker (in Czech/Slovak or English), and if you really like the game, there
is also the English translation that really needs some love. So show your
support and please make some bug reports (I'm really counting on you guys, so
prove that this community is worth more than just a bunch of overgrown kids,
spending their time trolling here, and doesn't contributing anything useful).
Not to forget, all the neccessary information is available on this page.
