BaKGL

Documentation

Intro

I’ll be using this site record my development and reverse engineering efforts on the 1993 video game Betrayal at Krondor.

I fell in love with Betrayal at Krondor at about age ten, playing it with my father on an old i386 PC. To me, Betrayal at Krondor feels like a warm cup of cocoa, taking me back to a time when I adventured with Owyn, Gorath and Locky.

Coming back to the game in the modern era, it’s clear that despite how excellent the game, story, and mechanics are, the graphics could do with an update. I began this project in 2019 using the bones of the xbak project. I’d just purchased the OpenGL Super Bible and was itching for a project to begin working on. My goal was to recreate the game and (eventually) improve the graphics. Close to 6 years later I’ve made significant progress reverse engineering the game mechanics, graphics formats, animation formats, and writing a (admittedly simple) game engine to play the game in. I still haven’t achieved my goal of improving the graphics though, but I’m hoping I might get some help with that as more people become familiar with the project.

In these pages I’ll be documenting how Betrayal at Krondor works. I’ll be going through all the game systems and formats. Expect progress to be slow as I enjoy programming more than writing, but hopefully this will be a useful resource for those interested in learning more about how one of the very best RPGs ever made ticks.

Links

The repo for the game engine is here: BaKGL Repo.

You can find the latest release for Windows here: Windows Releases

The repo for the site is here: GitHub Repo for this blog

Site revision: 024d9627789f77092cd15c7c7ebdb1f95f65330b