tl;dr : I switched from WAV to OGG files for the music, greatly reducing the package’s size ; a Linux build will come soon and I will eventually release the full source code for nKaruga.

Hey there,

nKaruga version 0.2.5 is out ! In this new patch, I have implemented the necessary changes in nKaruga to definitely ditch WAV files and start using OGG files for the music ; the result is a much smaller package size, from over 48 MB to barely 9 MB !

For you tech-savvy folks out there, I have successfully switched from MinGW-gcc to MSYS2 (backed by MinGW-w64), meaning that I could finally write a fully-functional makefile that should work with both Windows and Linux targets (testing in progress). At least it does work with Windows so hey, there’s that !
Some dependencies have changed, obviously, but as always I have included everything you need in DLL form, and only the mandatory stuff.

Another thing that comes from the change in toolchain is that I will finally have a source code worth releasing. At the time of writing, nKaruga is a game worth of 9699 lines of hand-written C++ code. It uses a graphics engine written by myself for the occasion, named n2DLib, built on top of SDL2. It doesn’t use any actual SDL2 function for the graphics (especially not hardware acceleration), and only uses it to interface with the keyboard and to handle sound (via SDL2_mixer). I started nKaruga over 2 years ago now as a calculator game targetting the TI-Nspire series (it’s true) in order to get better at programming, and now it has evolved into an actual, playable and (I hope) enjoyable PC game, with a bright future (for my defense, I attended a veeery intense education system here in France during those 2 years, which is why it took me so long to come to that point). This is why I think the source code is worth releasing, as it can help some people get better with game programming too, and the code itself does have some interesting bits to it (such as a hand-written rotosprite function in the graphics lib, and a class to handle images linked together by anchor points).

Stay tuned, and keep enjoying the game !