Welcome to the new drastically restructured Pingus page. This page gives you a quick intro to the game Pingus and more important tells you what you can do to make this Game happen. This page is meant as a first step to simplify the old page and to give the gamer a better overview of what he can do to contribute. I would also like to make a clearer cut between development and playable versions in the future.
Pingus has started at the end of 1998 with the simple goal to
create a Free (as in freedom, not as in free beer)
Lemmingstm clone. The Free
, which
means you get the sources and are allowed and encouraged to
change and distribute them, you basically get everything that I
used to create this game. In the years it has grown than quite a
bit over the original goal and become something more than just a
clone, we have original artwork, a built-in level editor, new
actions and a few other features. Both Windows and GNU/Linux
versions of the game can be downloaded at the bottom of this
page.
If you don't know Lemmingstm, here comes a short
introduction. Its a puzzle game developed in 1991 by DMA
Design. The player takes command in the game of a bunch of
small animals and has to guide them around in levels. Since the
animals walk on their own, the player can only influence them by
giving them commands, like build a bridge
,
dig a hole
or redirect all lemmings in the
other direction
. The goal of each level is to reach the
exit, for fix multiple combination of commands are necesarry.
The game is presented in a 2D site view. For more informations
you might want to visit Lemmingstm
fanpage
While Pingus is based on the idea of Lemmingstm, it has included some other ideas, which weren't presented in the original Lemmingstm, like the worldmap or secret levels, which might be familiar from games the Super Mario World and other Nintendo games. We have also a few new actions, like the jumper which weren't presented in the original game. To get an impression of the look of the Pingus game, here comes a screenshot:
Pingus has gone a long way since the first release and we have finished the engine mostly. A few bugs might still be remaining but in general the game engine works. But what we currently miss is a game built with that engine. Pingus is merely a collection of random levels at the moment, they are not ordered after difficulty or topic. We also lack a story, even so there are a few ideas for a story.
As said, this is a Free game developed by volunteers, but we are currently only a few and could need some more help. You don't to be a great artist, even so it would be nice if you would, you don't need to be a C++ programmer, even so it would be nice if you would, all you basically need is a bit of spare time and an eye to rate and playtest all the levels that we currently have. You also need to be prepared to encounter bugs or unplayable levels, so if something doesn't work as expected it might be either a bug or an unexpected behaviour, which we might need to fix. So here a short summary of what we need (in order of importance):
If you think you can help with one of the above, drop a mail to the devel mailing list at pingus-devel@mail.freesoftware.fsf.org for more details. Almost everybody should be able to help with Beta Testing, so don't be shy.
For a quick help you can try the IRC server irc.openprojects.net:6667 and the channel #pingus, you can find the project maintainer (nick: grumbel) there most of the time.
If you don't like IRC, there is also the possibility to contact us directly via IM.
If you want to write a longer comment, send patches or similar thing, the best way is probally by using the pingus-devel mailing lists, subscribe information can be found below, to just send a mail to the list write to pingus-devel@mail.freesoftware.fsf.org.
If you found a bug, its most likly the best to send it directly to the bug tracker, so it doesn't get lost on the mailinglist by acciedent, you can find the bugtracker at:
As said Pingus is still not a finished game, its a random collection of levels. So you should not download and play this game if you expect a fully working bug free game, you should instead wait a few month till we get a first playable version out.
You only need the source code when you want to help programming this game or if you want to package it for a distribution:
The CVS version is the latest up to date development versions, it shows the current state of Pingus. Its only needed for developers and playtesters: