our roots lie in the demoscene, a hobbyist scene of computer-graphic artists with thier own set of rules. one of its aspects is a special competition where you have to create an executable program file that is no larger than 64 kilobytes, but still contains an audio-visual presentation of some kind. all graphic and sound data has to be included in this small file. in december 2000 we released our first entry in such a competition, fr-08: .the .product under the demo-scene label farbrausch.

while using traditional painting programs, fiver2 noticed that he only needs a few simple primitives and filters to create very realistic looking textures. he defined a set of operations and asked chaos to write a user interface where the artist can specify, modify and store these operations. in the 64k program, these stored operations are executed and the image is generated. Just a few hundred bytes are needed to specify a texture, and there are no compression artifacts.

.the .product surpassed our own expectations and became a big success within the demoscene. as we felt we had only just uncovered the potential of procedural content-generation, we immediately continued working on our technology, using our newly-gained experience to make it all the more usable and powerful.

as 2001 was coming to an end, we met again, toying with our newest experiments. the results were, again, beyond what we'd originally expected, and we began thinking about how we could show both the elegance of procedural content creation and the quality of its results to a larger audience. a small yet graphically sophisticated first-person shooter seemed an obvious and realistic goal - .kkrieger was born!

but we had other projects to finish at the time, so it took about half a year before chaos, in mid-2002, actually started working on the project. it was apparent from the start that .kkrieger was too big for two people to finish in their spare time, so giZMo and ryg joined the project around January 2003, when the preliminary design of both code and the game itself was finished and development could start in earnest.

development steadily progressed, and by october we had enough done to start thinking about sound, which is were wayfinder and kb came in. both had already been working on music for our earlier 64k projects, and when we asked them whether they were interested they enthusiastically joined our team.

in mid-january 2004, we decided to release .kkrieger at Breakpoint 2004, one of the biggest demoscene events in Europe, no matter how finished it was. We had been working on it for a long time now and badly needed a break, but we also didn't want to go to Breakpoint with empty hands, so we had to release (out of a competition, we assumed at the time, because Breakpoint only has a 96k game competition and we didn't think we'd get .kkrieger that small).

as breakpoint came closer and closer and we still had to fix a lot of problems, it became clear that we wouldn't be able to include everything we wanted - we didn't even have enough time to place enemies in the whole level, let alone do some gameplay or AI tuning. so the drastic decision to throw away the biggest part of the level, at least for the Breakpoint version, was made. that got us a lot closer to 96kb, so we decided to make it a 96k game and compete at Breakpoint after all.

making it fit into 96k was again a lot of work and so we still ran out of time for proper gameplay tuning or even real beta testing. but what mattered was that, when Breakpoint came, we had something we could definitely release for the 96k game competition. given the state of the game then, and our conviction to make a proper version later, we decided to call it ".kkrieger 1 beta", and make a proper final version later that we would openly announce and spread.

after breakpoint had ended with us winning the 96k game competition, we drove home and, first of all, had some proper sleep. on the next day, we discovered (much to our surprise) that .kkrieger had made it to some of the bigger internet news sites, among them Slashdot, while we only had a dummy website for .kkrieger with some screenshots and a download link. ooops. so much about first keeping the whole thing quiet...

well, and this is where we are now. we're still absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of attention, news coverage and most of all emails we got with .kkrieger, and it looks like we'll have to finish the ifinal version sooner than we thought. so stay tuned for updates!