Readme:

WHAT:

So, uh, there's a bunch of penguins on an iceberg in Antarctica. You have been selected to catch them so they can be shipped to Finland, where they are essential to a secret plot for world domination.

In order to trap the penguins, you'll need to break the iceberg into small chunks. (They're afraid of water, for no apparent reason. Ah well. "The Matrix" had more plot holes than this, and it still was a hit.) You do this by melting lines in the ice with Special High-Tech GNU Tools.

If a penguin hits a line in progress, however, it vanishes with a loud noise, and you lose a life. (Yes, a life. This story is really breaking down, isn't it? But never fear -- I'll keep going until it's completely dead.) [note]

Once 80% or more of the iceberg is gone, the remaining chunks are small enough for shipping. Of course, if you manage to get rid of more than that, you'll save on postage, thus earning you exponential amounts of Geek Cred (a.k.a. "score").

After you ship off one batch of penguins, it's time to move on to the next. Each subsequent 'berg will have one more penguin, and you'll have one more life. This will continue until you lose, or until you exceed level one hundred or so, which Ain't Gonna Happen.

Of course, this is an urgent mission, so you'll be penalized if you're slow -- every second or so, your score drops down by one. But don't worry, I'm not completely cruel, so any points you earn on one level are yours to keep forever, no matter how long you take on subsequent icebergs.

As far as I can tell, this makes no narrative sense whatsoever, so at this point, I declare the backstory / game metaphor completely collapsed. Just go play.

HOW:

The left mouse button starts drawing lines; the right (and/or middle) button toggles between making vertical and horizontal lines. Note that left clicking actually starts two lines: either up and down or left and right. (This will make plenty of sense when you're actually playing.) If one of these lines is hit before it reaches the edge of the iceberg, you'll lose a life. If both are hit, you'll lose two lives.

As a tiny bit of grace, if you click directly on a penguin, it'll say "Ouch" and nothing else will happen.

Once a line is completed, any area containing no penguins is cleared. Falls into the ocean, so to speak. Once 80% has been cleared, the level is complete. However, you get an exponential bonus for every percentage point above that, so you want to try to make your last line suddenly clear a huge chunk of ice. (Again, this will make sense once you've played for a while.) Oh, and you also get a (much smaller) bonus for having lives left over at the end of a level.

Having trouble? A hint: it's useful to make traps by intentionally letting some of your lines get broken. That way, you can create smaller areas in which you can catch the pesky little things easily.

WHY:

There's a game for MS Windows called "Jezzball". You may notice that this one is extremely similar. There's a reason for that. See, our main computer at home runs Linux most of the time, but it has Win95 set up to dual-boot if need be. (Unfortunately, it's too slow to run VMware or Wine well.) Ideally, of course, the machine stays in Linux, but my wife, Karen, really likes puzzle sorts of games and became highly addicted to this Jezzball thing. Well, we simply couldn't have the system wasting its life in Windows all that time, so I took it upon myself to create a sort-of-clone. (It's not a pure clone, because I like to think that I've done many things in a far superior way.) So this game can be thought of, in a simultaneously dangerously geeky and dangerously mushy way, as sort of a dual love-letter, to both Karen and Linux. :)

It's therefore somewhat ironic that IceBreaker now exists in a MS Windows version. Ah well. I know not all of you have been converted yet, and you might as well enjoy the game too.

Oh, and to answer another "Why" question, especially for my friend Lars: why is this program written in C and yet uses C++ style comments? Because I like C++ style comments, that's why.

WHO:

This game was written by Matthew Miller <send e-mail>.

Recent versions have benefited immensely from the help of Enrico Tassi. He's responsible for getting the Win32 port to work so nicely, and for a lot of fancy new features. Enrico doesn't live here in Boston, but he's a huge fan of Boston band Letters To Cleo, so that counts for something.

Much thanks to Karen for everything. In fact, if you really love this game, check out Ten Thousand Villages, the non-profit organization for which she works. And if you live near Boston, MA, stop by store in Coolidge Corner (Brookline) and say "Hi" and perhaps buy something -- they have cool stuff and it's a really great organization.

Thanks also to Tae-Jin, for helping me squash a nasty bug, and to Paul for testing and suggestions and proofreading this document. And to the folks at the helpdesk downstairs for playing this game instead of working.

The sounds were either originally created or borrowed from freely-licensed sources and modified heavily. Thanks to Wesley Crossman for his contributions. I'd still like lots more cool good ones -- either improvements of the existing sounds or for new themes.

The penguin image is mostly my own work, but is based on a graphic from Pingus.

WHEN:

A week or two in September, 2000, and then some.

WHERE:

Get it from: http://www.mattdm.org/icebreaker/

Report bugs via e-mail: <get address>

WHICH:

(As in, "On which libraries does icebreaker depend?")

libSDL and libSDL_mixer. http://www.libsdl.org/

WHITHER:

I'm now actively working on IceBreaker, and a few other people have been too (most notably, Enrico Tassi). If you want to help, or are just interested in what's going on, check out the development section of the IceBreaker website at http://www.mattdm.org/icebreaker/development.shtml.