A 1.5GHz Pentium3/Athlon or faster.
- 512MB of RAM (or more)
- A Geforce4Ti (or higher) or ATI Radeon8500 (or higher) graphics card
supporting pixel shaders 1.3, preferably with 128MB or more of VRAM.
- Some kind of sound hardware
- DirectX 9.0b
According to the developers, .kkrieger's idea was born from the concept of demoscene, a project where different groups try to generate music clips which exploit the hardware of high-end computer hardware as well as limiting the size of such 'demos' to 64 KByte. At some point, the idea of a 32 KByte game competition came up and later was extended to 96 KByte. "This is where we got together and thought that you can fit quite a bit into 96 KByte," said Christoph Muetze, who created some of the graphics for .krieger.
"Our idea was to create a first person shooter, since they are very straight forward and therefore was much easier to create than for example a role playing game. And most people enjoy such shooters," Muetze said. The .theprodukkt project team includes six people, located in different parts in Germany. The group includes graphic artists, computer science students as well as professional game developers.
The creation of .kkrieger took 2 years, 1 year was spent on developing the content. Over this timeframe, the group squeezed the functionality of the game, including lighting and shader effects, into 104,363 program lines: 60 KByte of code and 36 KByte of content add up to the final 96 KByte of .kkrieger.
The greatest challenge of the game was, according to Muetze, to achieve the goal of getting everything into 96 KByte. The group claims that it does not use any sort of 'magic', but rather simple C++ code. "The game writes all data into the computer's RAM. The 96 KByte of .kkrieger include a generator which basically follows a cookbook receipe. It calculates textures, geometrics as well as objects," Muetze explained.
