This is the home page for Batrachians, a fly-eating frog video game. It is a clone of the 1982 Frog Bog video game for the Intellivision, from Mattel.

Batrachians 0.1.5 is out (2011-04-16). A --max-num-flies command-line switch has been added to allow the user to specify the maximum number of simultaneous flies. Also, the clock now correctly pauses when the game gets paused by a loss of window focus. Since version 0.1.4, the F11 key toggles between full-screen mode and window mode.

Requirements:
SDL, SDL_image and SDL_mixer on a GNU/Linux system. The sources might compile on other Unix-like systems.

Download

You need to get batrachians and flatzebra. Your system is assumed to already have the SDL, SDL_image and SDL_mixer packages.

Package	Ver.	Source	SRPM	RPM
batrachians	0.1.5
flatzebra	0.1.5
flatzebra-devel	0.1.5
burgerspace	1.9.0
cosmosmash	1.4.5
afternoonstalker	1.1.4

(MD5 and SHA1 values of these files)

The RPM packages were produced on a Fedora 14 GNU/Linux system.

If you want to build binary RPMs by yourself and need an introduction to the subject, I wrote a brief RPM Building Crash Course (also available in French). All of my source archives contain an RPM .spec file.

The sources are in C++ and can be compiled and installed with the familiar ./configure && make && make install sequence.

License

Batrachians and the "flatzebra" library are free software released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.

SDL is a free library distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License.

Documentation

Game Play

The command batrachians runs the game. If you use GNOME, you should see an entry for Batrachians in the Games menu.

You control the red frog, and your goal is to eat more flies and score more points than the computer's frog, which is gray. A game lasts three minutes, during which day becomes night.

Above your frog, you will see crosshairs of the same color. You can move it with the four arrow keys. The crosshairs designate the highest point of the jump you want your frog to make. Typically, you should put the crosshairs near the fly you want to catch, and then hit the left Ctrl key to jump.

While in the air, you must press the left Shift key to make your frog stick out its tongue. Your frog will eat any fly that its tongue touches. Avoid falling in the water, as your frog will waste time while it swims back to a lily pad.

These controls may be difficult to master at first. You may want to always press left Ctrl and left Shift together to simplify things.

The Escape key quits the game.

Contact

I can be reached (in French or English) by email at sarrazip at sarrazip dot com. My main Web page is Pierre and his Poor Pathetic Page (or La Petite Page Plate de Pierre in French).

Screenshot