Following a similar path to his last release, Cherry Bomb, Jeroen Vermeulen has released Porklike, another new game for RISC OS.
The path in question is that it’s a RISC OS version of a game created for another platform as part of a development tutorial provided on YouTube by Krystian Majewski under the Lazy Devs Academy banner. Jeroen’s version, a Python/Pygame conversion with some very slight differences to Krystian’s original, can be downloaded for our OS via !Store.
The game is essentially a ‘Rogue-like’, a term used to cover a loosely defined genre of game that have some common characteristics, including randomised playing areas, only a single life, fairly simple – sometimes even text-based – graphics, turn-based movement, and a few others.
In Porklike, the player must navigate the Tower of Wurstlord, in which there are many traps and enemies to overcome, and steal the Wurstlord’s legendary Kielbasa – although I personally would wonder how it is known to be legendary; presumably someone had to eat it to proclaim it as such, in which case there should be nothing left to steal? But anyway, let’s gloss over that…
There are nine floors to negotiate in the tower, and on each you must find the exit stairs that lead to the next – but your progress will be hampered by the various enemies you’ll encounter along the way. These can be defeated in a fight, and to aid in that you will find various weapons hidden in pots and chests that can be found scattered throughout area – but be aware that not all enemies (nor weapons) exhibit the same behaviour.
Spend too long to exit a level and the boss himself – the evil Wurstlord – will take up the chase in order to stop you, so be as quick as you can!
Control is via the keyboard or USB-connected controller (which must be plugged in before running the game. Porklike features in-game music and sound effects, and increasing difficulty as you progress through the levels. It runs in a 16-million colour screen mode, with the play area being just 512×512, and it can be played either in the desktop or full-screen.
For RISC OS, Jeroen recommends a Raspberry Pi 4 or similar level of hardware, and says it has been tested on a Pi 4 with RISC OS 5.28/9, Python 3.8, and Pygame 1.9.6. He also notes that the game has been tested on Windows 11 and Raspberry Pi OS ‘Bullseye’ (named for the version of Debian the Pi OS is based on). To run Jeroen’s version on those operating systems, navigate into the !Porklike application directory on them, and load the main.py file found inside into a Python editor, and choose ‘Run’.
You can also download Krystian Majewski’s original version, whose Ko-fi page Jeroen also points to if people would care to make a small contribution.
