This is a clone of the game Kye for Windows, originally by Colin Garbutt. It is a puzzle game, which is a little like the old falling-rocks puzzle games, and perhaps also inspired a little by Sokoban. But Kye has more variety of objects, and so is capable of posing quite complex puzzles.

This clone is written by Colin Phipps in Python and uses Gtk 3. So it will run on modern Linux systems easily enough, and indeed should work on any system with working Python and pygobject. It works on Windows as well, for instance.

• For Debian or Ubuntu: apt-get install python-gtk2 librsvg2-common
• For FreeBSD: portinstall py24-gtk librsvg2

To install Kye, run ./setup.py install; Kye should then be in your path (on Debian-like system, you may have to install python2.4-dev for this to work). Or you can just run it from the extracted tarball, with ./Kye.

This section is untested and likely to be incomplete; please send updates if you figure out how to make it work.

See http://games.moria.org.uk/kye/download-install#install-win for the latest Windows install instructions - these are fairly new so the online instructions may be newer and better. There are quite a few things to install I'm afraid, as there doesn't seem to be a single installer available that includes the bits that you need.

• Install Python 3.8, GTK 3, pygobject, and pycairo
• Having run the installers for all of those, you can then download and extract Python Kye for Windows (that's what you've done already to be reading this file). Extract it to your "My Documents" is fine if you like.
• Run a command prompt, and go to the kye-1.0 directory that you just extracted.
• In the command prompt run

python Kye.py

And you should see Kye running now.

I won't bother describing the game in great detail here - learn by playing. You are "Kye", the green blob. Move by point-and-click, or using the cursor keys - you can use the numeric keypad too, and you can move diagonally. Holding a key down causes you to move continuously, after a delay; hold SHIFT down first to suppress the delay.

You have to collect the diamonds. You have 3 lives (shown in the status bar) and you lose a life whenever you come into contact with a monster. Blocks with arrows on are sliders (square) or rockies (round) which (in the direction of the arrow) move until then run up against an obstacle. The other common objects are the brown/yellow blocks, which are just inanimate blocks that you can push around, and the sentries, which are the yellow pointed-square marching things that can also push stuff around. It's easiest to learn the game by playing some easier levels - it loads intro.kye by default when it is run, and this gives a few easy levels to get you into the swing of things.

See http://games.moria.org.uk/kye/ for more introduction to the game, and in particular http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is-9SjYr_WE which is a demonstration video that I have put together which shows the game elements. If you would like me to put up more explanatory videos, let me know (my email address is at the end of this readme).

Once you understand the basics, you can go looking for some more challenging levels to play. There are more levels on my site at http://games.moria.org.uk/kye/mylevels ; there are many levels available from sites listed in http://dmoz.org/Games/Video_Games/Puzzle/Mazes/Shareware/Kye/ ; and the levels distributed with the original Kye game are available at: http://www.classicgaming.com/kye/registration.htm

You can write your own levels for Kye. Run Kye-edit to use the included level editor. See http://games.moria.org.uk/kye/pygtk#editing for further instructions.

To use Kye, you have to have a set of images - one such set is supplied by default, but others are available. The Linux version includes a set of images which I have designed, which are done as SVG so they work better at larger screen sizes; these are included by default in the Linux version. My images are open-source like Python Kye itself, whereas the original game images are owned by Colin Garbutt, which is why I don't distribute those as part of this package

• if you prefer to use the original game images, you can download the alternative images.tar.gz from my website, and replace the images.tar.gz in this directory (or, if you have already installed Python Kye, drop them in either /usr/local/share/kye/ or /usr/share/kye, or just in the directory where you run Kye). (Note that the Windows version ships with the original game images by default.)

This version of Kye is Copyright (C) 2004-2010 Colin Phipps. It is made available under the GNU General Public License (see the file COPYING for details). Furthermore, as the game idea comes from the original Kye game, to maintain the spirit of the original distribution rules, Kye is charityware - if you enjoy playing Kye, you are encouraged to donate to a children's charity (Save the Children was the beneficiary of the original Kye, but the NSPCC, or whatever equivalent charities are available in your own country, will do just as well).

Python Kye and the supplied levels & graphics are written by Colin Phipps. Python Kye is Copyright (c) 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 by Colin Phipps; it is distributed under the GNU General Public License v2, see COPYING for details.

It is modelled on the original Kye for Windows by Colin Garbutt.

Thanks also to:

vexorian@gmail.com for useful feedback, and information about the original Kye

Viktor Kerkez for the basis of the RPM spec file, & I have incorporated some of his patches.