Dink Smallwood

Last updated
Dink Smallwood
Dinksmallwoodlogo.png
Developer(s) Robinson Technologies
Publisher(s)
Designer(s) Seth Robinson
Platform(s) Windows, Linux, OS X, PlayStation Portable, iOS, Android
Release1998
Genre(s) Action role-playing game
Mode(s) Single player

Dink Smallwood is an action role-playing video game developed by Robinson Technologies at the time consisting of Seth Robinson, Justin Martin, and Greg Smith. It was first released in 1998 before being released as freeware on October 17, 1999. [1] Mitch Brink composed several of the game's music tracks while others are MIDI forms of classical music such as Debussy's "Reverie". The game has a small but constant fan following that continues to develop add-ons for the game more than two decades after its release. [2] The game is also notable for its humorous dialogue and surrealistic themes in various scenes between the gameplay.

Contents

Gameplay

The house of Dink Smallwood at the start of the game, before it burns down. Dink Smallwood House.gif
The house of Dink Smallwood at the start of the game, before it burns down.

The game centers on Dink, a pig farmer-turned-hero who embarks on various quests throughout his world. The game features isometric, Diablo-like gameplay, [3] including weapons, items, and magic. The game has a satirical off-color slant, including everything from a fiercely abusive uncle to a town that worships ducks. Dink is never freed from the grievances of being a pig farmer, a fact he is far too often reminded of by his nemesis, Milder Flatstomp.

Storyline

Dink starts out as a pig farmer, living a normal life in Stonebrook, his home village. His father is said to have disappeared, leaving him behind in a small village with his mother. Somehow, as he is outside, his house burns down and his mother is killed. He is then told to go out of his village into the world to find his aunt and start living a new life with her. Along the way, he hears of a powerful and sinister group known as the Cast whose nefarious deeds are threatening the kingdom. Dink eventually makes it his quest to defeat this mysterious cult. After that, he goes in the Darklands to kill the mighty evil, Seth.

History

Development

Dink Smallwood was developed by Robinson Technologies in the mid 1990s at the time where Seth Robinson, Justin Martin, and Greg Smith were involved. Mitch Brink composed several of the game's music tracks. The game was initially released in 1997 for purchase in the United States and Europe. The game could be purchased from retail stores in Europe via European publisher Iridon Interactive, though Robinson Technologies did not secure a publisher for the United States, so this required them to sell to this region via mail order at the price of $25 (including shipping).

Freeware release

By the summer of 1999, Robinson Technologies had sold out of all their copies of Dink Smallwood and claimed that there were no plans to publish more copies. It was announced a short time later that the game would be distributed as freeware, and the freeware version of Dink Smallwood was released on October 17, 1999.

Source code release

Shortly after the freeware release, fans of the game often asked Seth Robinson if he had any plans to release the game's source code. Seth generally replied "no." He commonly cited the game's sloppy and embarrassing coding as a reason for withholding the source from the community. After years of being pressed to do so, Seth finally decided to release the source code on July 17, 2003 under a Zlib-inspired own license [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] without the content which was kept proprietary freeware. [9] In 2008, the artwork was published (without some sounds) under a Zlib license. [10]

A handful of projects focused on upgrading or porting Dink Smallwood have surfaced, most of them being canceled or postponed indefinitely.

Community-made Dink 1.08

In 2005, Seth Robinson asked Dan "redink1" Walma, the owner of the Dink Network fan site, to create a new patch for Dink Smallwood. [11] Robinson hoped that the numerous longstanding bugs in Dink would be fixed and the experience for new players would be streamlined. [12] After eight-and-a-half months of development and numerous builds of alpha, beta, and release candidate testing involving the community, [11] Dink Smallwood 1.08 was released as community-fixed version on March 10, 2006. [13]

GNU FreeDink

The GNU GPL licensed GNU FreeDink fork, which is developed under the GNU Project umbrella, works on replacing the last proprietary sounds to make the game completely Free software. [14] GNU FreeDink was ported to a variety of platforms including the PlayStation Portable, Linux, AmigaOS 4 and Mac OS X among others. GNU Freedink is based on the original v1.07 source code release, but has modes to run like v1.08. It is continuously updated and is the most successful source port so far. [15] [16]

DFArc2, a small GTK+ utility program, makes it easy to play and manage the Dink Smallwood game and its numerous Dink Modules (or D-Mods). [17]

Dink Smallwood HD

As of December 16, 2011, a new version of Dink Smallwood called "Dink Smallwood HD" has been developed for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows XP/Vista/7, webOS and Mac OS X by Seth Robinson. [18] In the Windows/Mac/Android versions, it is also possible to play the fan-made D-Mods. A new feature is instant-load and instant-save where the player can save and load the game at any point - as opposed to the original game where saving was only possible at specific points in the game. [19]

In October 2017 the HD version became fully free and open source too. [20] The source code became available on GitHub shortly after. [21]

Modification

Two level editors exist for Dink Smallwood. The original level editor, developed by Robinson Technologies, is DinkEdit, which is included with the game, and the second level editor is WinDinkEdit which was developed by fans of the game. The freeware game comes with its own D-Mod (short for Dink Module), Mystery Island, which follows Dink's adventures after his victory in the original story. D-Mods can be heavily customized, and some of them are very different from the original game. Many D-Mods, some of them much longer than the original game, can be found online.

DinkEdit is a modal application that can be used to create a new world. The game world consists of at most 768 screens and each screen can have at most a hundred editor-placed sprites. Among other tasks, the editor can be used to specify music for a screen, assign scripts to sprites and to decorate the game world. WinDinkEdit is a level editor for Windows which enables the D-Mod author to perform the same tasks in a graphical environment.

The DinkC scripting language has a C-like syntax. Variables are prefixed with an ampersand, &, and single line comments are supported with //. Each sprite in the game can have a script attached to it which will be used to determine the behavior and appearance of the sprite. The engine calls various functions on certain events; for example, the 'main', 'talk' and 'hit' functions of a script will respectively be called upon loading the screen, when the player talks to the sprite and when the player hits the sprite. Each screen can also have a script attached to it which can be used for initialization of the screen or other events.

Reception

Computer Gaming World Issue #189 featured Dink Smallwood in the section "The Good", saying "Now here is something totally refreshing". [24] While compared to other role-playing games, Dink Smallwood was praised for its humour, [25] being described as “a spoonful of Zelda ,…a dash of Monkey Island and a pinch of Diablo .” [1] The humour was described as the one good aspect of the game and was found quite entertaining. [26] However, with other elements letting the game down, the humour only made Dink Smallwood suitable as "an inexpensive stopgap". [23] The dialogue used when interacting with NPCs was criticised for containing errors [1] as well as having little influence on the overall outcome of the game. [23] Graphical errors were also listed, with the player character getting stuck on scenery and unable to move, [26] or NPCs or monsters drifting through walls. The lack of interaction between NPCs and monsters was also referenced, with NPCs attempting to hold conversations while the player is in combat. [23] Although Dink Smallwood was described as having little replay value on its own, the inclusion of editing software and the wide availability of user-generated content were noted as improving on this. [23]

References and impact

In Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast , a reference to Dink Smallwood can be found: "(Facetiously) I am Dinkamus Littlelog and I come in search of the holy groundhog.".

In Borderlands' first DLC, The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, an adventurer named Dirk Smallwood is part of a missing "Misery Bus" crew parodying Scooby-Doo.

See also

Related Research Articles

ncurses Text-based user interface API

ncurses is a programming library providing an application programming interface (API) that allows the programmer to write text-based user interfaces (TUI) in a terminal-independent manner. It is a toolkit for developing "GUI-like" application software that runs under a terminal emulator. It also optimizes screen changes, in order to reduce the latency experienced when using remote shells.

<i>Marathon Trilogy</i> Video game series

The Marathon Trilogy is a science fiction first-person shooter video game series from Bungie, originally released for the Classic Mac OS. The name of the series is derived from the giant interstellar colony ship that provides the main setting for the first game; the ship is constructed out of the Martian moon Deimos. The series is often regarded as a spiritual predecessor of Bungie's Halo series.

<i>Liero</i> 1998 action video game

Liero is a video game for MS-DOS, first released by Finnish programmer Joosa Riekkinen in 1998. The game has been described as a real-time version of Worms. Liero is Finnish for 'earthworm' and is pronounced. Inspired itself by the earlier game MoleZ, Liero provided inspiration for the later games Soldat and Noita.

Source is a 3D game engine developed by Valve. It debuted as the successor to GoldSrc in 2004 with the releases of Half-Life: Source, Counter-Strike: Source, and Half-Life 2. It is most well-known for its usage by Valve, but the engine has been used both by small teams and individuals to create modifications of Valve games, and other studios creating distinct games, notably Troika Games title Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Valve continued to create incremental updates to the Source engine after its 2004 release, most of which coincided with games created by Valve. In the late 2010s, Valve created the Source 2 engine to replace Source, with it publicly debuting alongside Half-Life: Alyx. The Source engine is most well-known for its advancements in physics, AI, and graphics.

Doom WAD is the default format of package files for the video game Doom and its sequel Doom II: Hell on Earth, that contain sprites, levels, and game data. WAD stands for Where's All the Data? Immediately after its release in 1993, Doom attracted a sizeable following of players who created their own mods for WAD files—packages containing new levels or graphics—and played a vital part in spawning the mod-making culture which is now commonplace for first-person shooter games. Thousands of WADs have been created for Doom, ranging from single custom levels to full original games; most of these can be freely downloaded over the Internet. Several WADs have also been released commercially, and for some people the WAD-making hobby became a gateway to a professional career as a level designer.

Robinson Technologies is a video game developer located in Japan and founded by Seth Robinson. The company produced the BBS door games Legend of the Red Dragon, Planets: The Exploration of Space and Growtopia, an experimental multiplayer creative sandbox created as a collaboration with Hamumu Software, released in 2013 for iOS, Android, Microsoft Windows, and macOS.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-source Unicode typefaces</span>

There are Unicode typefaces which are open-source and designed to contain glyphs of all Unicode characters, or at least a broad selection of Unicode scripts. There are also numerous projects aimed at providing only a certain script, such as the Arabeyes Arabic font. The advantage of targeting only some scripts with a font was that certain Unicode characters should be rendered differently depending on which language they are used in, and that a font that only includes the characters a certain user needs will be much smaller in file size compared to one with many glyphs. Unicode fonts in modern formats such as OpenType can in theory cover multiple languages by including multiple glyphs per character, though very few actually cover more than one language's forms of the unified Han characters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open-source video game</span> Video game whose source code is open-source software

An open-source video game, or simply an open-source game, is a video game whose source code is open-source. They are often freely distributable and sometimes cross-platform compatible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aptana</span> Text editor

Aptana, Inc. is a company that makes web application development tools for use with a variety of programming languages. Aptana's main products include Aptana Studio, Aptana Cloud and Aptana Jaxer.

<i>Frets on Fire</i> 2006 video game

Frets on Fire (FoF) is a free, open-source music video game created by Finnish independent video game developer Unreal Voodoo. Players use the keyboard to play along with markers which appear on screen, with the aim to score points, achieve a high point multiplier, and complete a song. Frets on Fire was the winner of the Assembly 2006 game development competition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GrafX2</span> Raster graphics editor

GrafX2 is a bitmap graphics editor inspired by the Amiga programs Deluxe Paint and Brilliance. It is free software and distributed under the GPL-2.0-only license.

Cocos2d is an open-source game development framework for creating 2D games and other graphical software for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, Linux, HarmonyOS, OpenHarmony and web platforms. It is written in C++ and provides bindings for various programming languages, including C++, C#, Lua, and JavaScript. The framework offers a wide range of features, including physics, particle systems, skeletal animations, tile maps, and others.

<i>Stranded II</i> 2007 video game

Stranded II is a German 3D action-adventure survival video game released in June 2007 by German developer Unreal Software as a sequel to the original Stranded game. Just like in its predecessor, the main goal of the game is to survive on a desert island environment, ultimately escaping and returning home. The game can be downloaded for free on its official website and on the developer's website.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Perl programming language:

<i>No Gravity</i> (video game) 1990 video game

NoGravity is a space flight simulation and space shooter developed by realtech VR, a Montreal based, French Canadian independent computer games company. The game was ported to many platforms over the years as it was open sourced in 2005. NoGravity drew comparisons with the Wing Commander series.

Stride is a free and open-source 2D and 3D cross-platform game engine originally developed by Silicon Studio. It can be used to create video games for PC, mobile devices and virtual reality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aseprite</span> Pixel art image and animation editor

Aseprite is a proprietary, source-available image editor designed primarily for pixel art drawing and animation. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and features different tools for image and animation editing such as layers, frames, tilemap support, command-line interface, Lua scripting, among others. It is developed by Igara Studio S.A. and led by the developers David, Gaspar, and Martín Capello. Aseprite can be downloaded as freeware, or purchased on Steam or Itch.io. Aseprite source code and binaries are distributed under EULA, educational, and Steam proprietary licenses.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Payal Dhar (2002-09-05). "Dink Smallwood". Just RPG. Archived from the original on 2008-06-13. Retrieved 2008-05-31.
  2. ↑ "The Dink Network".
  3. ↑ Henrik, Tom (2005-02-15). "Dink Smallwood - Seth tells the history of the making of Dink Smallwood". www.reloaded.org. Retrieved 2013-07-15.
  4. ↑ Dink-Smallwood-Source-License
  5. ↑ "Files | Dink Smallwood Source Code".
  6. ↑ Dink Smallwood 1.08 source code, The Dink Network
  7. ↑ Readme of source code, Seth Robinson
  8. ↑ License of source code, Seth Robinson
  9. ↑ Dink-Smallwood-Source-License Please keep in mind while I'm sharing the source, I am not sharing the media, if you would like to use or distribute the Dink Smallwood artwork, this requires express permission.
  10. ↑ Find free sounds for FreeDink
  11. 1 2 Walma, Dan (March 10, 2006). "New File: Dink Smallwood 1.08 Final" . Retrieved November 18, 2008.
  12. ↑ Walma, Dan (June 26, 2005). "Dink Smallwood v1.08 - Suggestions" . Retrieved November 18, 2008.
  13. ↑ "Dink Smallwood: News" . Retrieved November 18, 2008.
  14. ↑ Find free sounds for FreeDink 2008-08-23
  15. ↑ "FreeDink Website" . Retrieved 2014-04-07.
  16. ↑ Larabel, Michael (2019-02-16). "GNU's RPG/Adventure Game Updated For SDL2, Defaults To OpenGL Rendering". Phoronix. Retrieved 2023-02-12.
  17. ↑ freedink-dfarc on debian.org
  18. ↑ Dink Smallwood HD official webpage on rtsoft.com
  19. ↑ Dink Smallwood Mobile – coming to iPad too!
  20. ↑ Dink Smallwood HD 1.89 released, made free on all platforms on codedojo.com
  21. ↑ DinkSmallwoodHD on github.com
  22. ↑ "Dink Smallwood Reviews". GameRankings . Retrieved 2008-06-20.
  23. 1 2 3 4 5 Brenesal, Barry. "Dink Smallwood for PC". GamePro. Archived from the original on 2008-02-08. Retrieved 2008-06-20.
  24. ↑ Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_189
  25. ↑ Bartic, Alex (September 1998). "Dink Smallwood". PC Games (in Romanian). Romania: Romas Comercial S.R.L. p. 46. ISSN   1453-4398.
  26. 1 2 Simon Ingham (2001-08-13). "PC Review:Dink Smallwood". CVG . Retrieved 2008-05-31.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.