Free compact shooter game
.kkrieger is a first-person shooter video game created by German demogroup .theprodukkt. It was first released in April 2004 and is still in beta as of 2021. The name of the program comes from the German word Krieger, which means “warrior.” Procedural generation approaches are heavily used by .kkrieger.
Textures are stored on a per-pixel basis rather than a per-texture basis, requiring only the background data and the generator code to be loaded into the executable, resulting in limited file size. Meshes are made up of simple solids like boxes and tubes that are deformed to achieve the desired shape.
What is .kkrieger?
To put it simply, .kkrieger is an interactive “demo.” The game was made at the dawn of home computers and brought with it tech hacking. As various groups hacked games and software, they would bring in intro demonstrations; this was how .theprodukkt sold themselves. Due to the simplicity of the electronics, they only had a small amount of room on a floppy disk or in RAM to slide these demos in.
Instead of rendering images into the floppy disc, the game is made up of hundreds of codes to generate a sphere, cube, or box mathematically, and then change its form, make it float, or change it’s color using math operations. This can be accomplished even more quickly than dealing with 50 subtly different shaped images.
The textures were constructed in such a way that they could be heavily compressed on a floppy disk and then uncompressed while the demo was run. Visual effects can also be achieved by operations and good programming; just open your favorite video player and switch on visualizations for a similar effect. Chiptunes, synthesizers, and midi are used in music for the same reason.
Proceed with caution
Ultimately, you should download .kkrieger simply for novelty. Expect a dated gaming experience as this game was conceptualized, developed, and published in beta mode. You must also consider that this game’s secondary purpose is entertainment. The main reason that .kkrieger is to prove the possibility of a visually appealing game to be compressed in an extremely small file.
