Sunday, April 25, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
One little bit of roguelike, One hint of click-n-point, One tiny bit of trade and then time for some things completely different
Doryen Arena is a real-time arena roguelike-like.. You buy weapons, you select and use skills, you kill and then you die. The end. :)
Pyromancer, by the same developer, looks more fun to me, but I have not had the chance to test it yet.
Both projects are visually rather impressive. Pretty lighting and fading and moving health numbers... Both use libtcod, which is a "fast, portable and uncomplicated API for roguelike developpers providing an advanced true color console, input, and lots of other utilities frequently used in roguelikes". Yet again by the same developer. If you find interest in such specialized libraries, librtxy, a retro vector games lib, might be interesting to you as well.
What you see above is an example of how scenery images are structured for the adventure "Beasts". According to the project's French-language wiki [EN translation] the project uses the proprietary American Girl Scouts engine.
I would be glad if someone offered to program the game using something more open, but it is great to have a good-looking adventure developed in a foss manner. The license is WTFPL.
Spice Trade is a trade-travel-explore and live-a-life game with wonderful graphics and music. You take the role of a young Baghdad farmer and have a life to master. Agriculture and hard work, religion and cult, trade and travel: these are your means of progressing. Marriage, supernatural encounters, fame and money are to achieve but there is probably much more which I haven't noticed yet.
The game has a beautiful point-and-click adventure and management interface, multiple-choice dialog and map travel. Unfortunately, there are some interface issues. Often it is not clear how much you pay for a transaction. At the start you have to pay attention and not skip the first dialog (which cannot be re-shown in a game) to know what the starting options are.
Many actions, especially "work" and "sleep" are accompanied by an animation, that takes way too long. On the other hand these drawbacks enforce a calm game style and serve as punishment for boring game play. Explanation: It is most effective to work in the harbor, as you get very much silver/day, but the animation steals much real time. Farming on the other hand is hardly profitable, but the accompanying animation is very short. The conclusion is that both forms of gaining riches are boring and that instead the player should only use these forms of earning money to be able to engage in travel and trade. That is, only if you do not like the player character to have a slow and calm life of course.
There is also battle in the game (it plays a minor role) and battle is very quick, so the feel is 'right' - boring activities bore you, because you have to wait for animations to finish, dangerous action has no waiting time.
There is at least one dangerous bug in the game. I recommend you to save the game each time before you talk to the doctor. Under certain circumstances, choosing a specific dialog tree path will result in not being able to say anything or close the dialog. So save often. :)
I have trouble with the audio system of the game, my solution was to mute it and instead play the wonderful music using a media player.
Knights is a multiplayer (there is a singleplayer mode) 2D dungeon game, in which the players have to fulfill one of many possible quests. The default is: find three gems and leave the dungeon.
I have so far only tried the tutorial level and imagine it would be great fun to play against a human player. An AI enemy would be nice too. As far as I understand, there is no such thing as of now.
It has nice graphics, effective sounds, a impressive and simple but at first confusing user interface (press-hold direction keys to execute context-sensitive actions).
Also: the following command might save you some confusion: './knights -d knights_data/'. If you care about licenses, this thread reveals a little about the content's.
Qonk is a minimal invade-all-planets time-is-the-only-resource RTS. Last developer activity was nearly 1000 days ago but latest SVN is stable. Qonk is a beautiful time waster.
Cuby is a very pleasant-looking and -sounding puzzle game and it has nothing to do with lame rubik's cubes! Cuby uses the Raydium engine, which has a weird build system. This post will aid you in your quest of compiling it well, if compiling is required.
If you like this game's visual or controls style, you have to check out Dusted's other games: SDL-Ball and OldSkoolGravityGame.
Ethanon is a quite amazing 2D (I repeat, 2D) game engine in development. No Linux version yet but porting will become a priority sooner or later. You can discuss the engine in this thread or on their google group.
Blockling is a puzzle game with cute pixel art gfx and retro sounds. "You are a young blockling who must stack blocks to reach the exit in successive levels!"
Monday, March 29, 2010
Weaver: Magic FPS, OpenArena 0.8.5, Evidyon, Code Summers and web findings
Weaver
Weaver [introduction] is an objective-based ("invade checkpoints") team fps with a simple gesture sequence spell casting system. It uses the XreaL engine and is currently in an early development stage. Maps are under construction and a few spells are in place. Code is GPL-licensed, "Media will aim to use Creative Commons licenses."The level work I was able to witness is impressive. TRaK is the designer, which explains it.
Weaver's introduction includes a simple game design document. Compilation instructions are located here, communication happens over forum and IRC.
OpenArena 0.8.5
OpenArena has a new website look and a new patch release. It provides new or improved weapon effects, player skins, menu UI (video, compare to old), icons......and maps. For example:
Even though OpenArena is supposed to be a freely licensed Quake3 clone (with an anime theme) it also adds new weapons and game modes. I recently tested some of them, for example the Overload game mode, in which you have to destroy the enemy's base crystal:
Evidyon
The Evidyon MMORPG's developer expressed their interest for making the game run on Linux and finds it to be relatively simple task. More info in this thread.Don't have much to add to that. I'm glad to hear that it's possible and I hope that somebody will want to take such a programming job. Here's the latest gameplay video of the game to make completing this task more desirable: :)
Google and Ruby Summers of Code
Battle for Wesnoth, Blender, Crystal Space, FreedroidRPG, Thousand Parsec, Tux4Kids and WorldForge take part in GoogleStudentsOpenCash.EDIT: I was just informed, that NeL will share WorldForge's GSoC permission.
By accident (I wanted to get on the Rigs of Rods IRC channel but found myself on a ruby one) I discovered the existence of the RubyStudentsOpenCash. Any FOSS game projects besides Rubygame that could benefit from this? :)
And.. some websites
Blendswap, the new blender file sharing site will probably use CC0, BY and BY-SA as available licenses [2] and that makes me glad..
I discovered SampleSwap (via this post), which has a CC-licensed music category. It is impossible to filter by license (non-free CC flavors are supported), but at least it is easy to identify it, if you care about the terms. It uses yahoo's handy proprietary flash audio player and lists individual tracks instead of the ancient album-model that Jamendo chose. This makes it much nicer to browse for me.
Last bit of info: GameBoom is a site that wants to bring foss games to the people. It tries to do so not by covering only foss games but by allowing gratis games, while promoting the free as in freedom ones.
They are looking for bloggers/game reviewers, so if you are not on a strict foss diet, maybe there's a game you would like to introduce over there? Always remember though, that guest posts are welcome on this blog as well. ;) Just contact us via forum, irc or email (I'm sure you'll be able to find the links up there :) ).
EDIT: Remember GameJolt, another games-thing, where open source games are given attention.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Evidyon, HackWars, and SlothRPG: FreeGamer MMO Time!
So, here we go! First post from scary old uncle TheAncientGoat ;)
Evidyon, MMO from Reddit-way
Evidyon is an interesting 3D MORPG recently gone Open Source under the advice of the reddit community, releasing a whole slew of content, tutorials and documentation of how they went about making it in the process. This is a very admirable move, we'll all agree, so show them some love. Unfortunately, it's windows only, relying on DirectX (not VB though, thanks for the fix Nerrad), and I haven't gotten it running under Wine as of yet, but hopefully a few smart alecs can help port it.
Like most other mmo's it has a fantasy setting, as you can see in the screenshot and video, it also sports a Diabloesque style of combat
HackWars: MMO where you craft by programming
Here's one for you scriptmonkies, Hackwars, a Java MMO where you play as a hacker (or cracker, more accurately), breaking into pcs by attacking their ports for massive damage. An interesting aspect of this game is its crafting system, you program your own programmes, either in Javascript or the game's built in HackScript, to make scripts that either help you fight or just entertain you. It has both a 2d and 3d interface.
This was also found via reddit and the author wrote some pretty interesting commentary on developing such a game (which you'll see if you follow that link). Also, why not post upcoming FOSS games on our little corner of redditOpenSourceGames and we'll try and cover them if we have the time.
SlothRPG
SlothRPG is a fantasy 2D MUD -like RPG, also written in Java. It has recently been re-invigorated, so it's worth checking for updates. Unfortunately it doesn't have any servers online at the moment, so you'll have to host your own if you want to check it out
Saturday, January 16, 2010
Cube2: Is it finally taking off?
So what can I add to this? Well first of all I forgot to mention this awesome TBS in my last post: UFO2000, which is of course like UFO:AI a clone of a very well known series.
And I should have also mentioned Stellar Forces which is a remake of Laser Squad :)
Cube2 Engine
So as you might have guessed todays topic will be the Cube2/Sauerbraten engine, which besides being a mighty fine game on its own, has also spawned some great offspring projects lately. Blood Frontier has been mentioned before and since there have not been any new releases since then I will keep it short and just mention this video review which gives you an idea of the game play. But check it out if you have not done so yet!
Platinum Arts Sandbox
Plantinum Arts Sandbox has also been mentioned here before, and could be quickly described as a game development platform aimed at kids (and adults), utilizing all the nice in game editor features the Cube2 engine offers (and more).
Recent news are that they are hosting a nice contest , they have also just announced a new version. And besides offering the usual amount of fixes and updates, it now boasts a really nice 2D platformer template for you to create new games:
Furthermore they have templates for RPG projects and for wanna be film makers a new tool called movie cube (movies made with game engines are also called Machinima for those unfamiliar with the term).
Syntensity
Syntensity is a project quite similar to the one mentioned above, albeit with a more mature focus. Their feature list is long and even though still under heavy development it is starting to be a really nice tool for game developers.
And besides the fact that we are happy to announce that they have chosen our network for hosting their community forums, they have also recently released a really nice new game template called Razanak:
So check it out via the Syntensity lobby (the mod gets dowloaded automatically when you enter the corresponding portal), and see for yourself what a powerful game making tool Syntensity has become.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Bitfighter, "Cat Sokoban", JVGS, pseudoform, Gun-Fu Deadlands, Hex-a-Hop, racr.. and YouTube overkill
All subscribers to the FGD Planet feed (RSS/Atom) probably would want to add this feed. We split the planet into a game news planet and a development news planet. The latter contains game developer blogs and game engine news.
Bitfighter is a no-gravity multi-player 2-D combat game with a cool name, cool looks, good controls and a quick way to get started. I like the visual style a lot too. (Which reminds of Word War vi by the way.) Unfortunately I was unable to compile on my 64-bit desktop so far (only on my 32-bit netbook).
The video recording qualities of my portable device are weak, so the video I recorded is .. broken. It plays 3x faster than it is supposed to. What you see in it is me flying on an empty server at 500ms latency, trying out the the "mines" and the "burst" weapons.
A game with an even more awesome name is The Villany of Cat Food Inc., which introduced on our forums as a little puzzle game, which I found to be a sokoban-like with interesting and weirdly cute story.
JVGS is the latest game brainchild of the author of Fall of Imiryn. It is a black and white "poem platformer" meaning you (sometimes) jump on platforms made of words -_-. The style is based on xkcd while the levels are based on .svg files - they are pre-rendered for use in the game though. The feeling is melancholic.. The controls are... not polished.. The video has been recorded...
Pseudoform.. aka portalized. aka Open Source Portal. It looks impressive! The game relies on non-free physics and sound libraries but the developers wish to change that. They are also thinking about using the Cube2 engine (although Cube2's main developer considers adding decent physics to his engine as equally challenging as creating an own engine).
Ah Gun-Fu Deadlands (GFD), you are pain, but even more pleasure, simple and forgiving but non-forgiving also. It is a specimen of retro 2D graphics wild west keyboard-move, mouse-aim game. One shot and you die but you also have unlimited lives and unlimited bullets. The lovely piece uses LÖVE. (Version 0.5, so watch your back!) It Is pretty much fantastic and well-received, according to the comments made on GFD's forum.
Do you like to stalk? Gun-Fu Deadlands' dad can be spotted in this photo!
Two years have passed since this blog last mentioned Hex-a-Hop. The project now has new developers (the original author disappeared it seems) and some sounds have been added to the game. The following might be the first recording of the game with sound/music! Who knows, maybe it will convince you to try it if you have not yet...
Are you a fan of Trophy and/or Racer and sad about these two not developing further [BEEP Racer's last release was 24th Dec 2009, shame on my research!] or do you just like top-down racing games? Maybe the new, early-development racr will give you hope.
I have something rather off-topic for you: a 5-headed team that is working on a audio editor and a video editor is looking for #6 in San Francisco, USA. Both their products are rather minimal so far. Let's call this news content-creation-related. :)
By the way: Having problems with the YT videos? I found youtube-dl to be an excellent tool for downloading videos for off-line/no-lag/no-flash-crash-risk watching of videos. `youtube -bt URL1 URL2 ...` will download the best quality and use titles in file names.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Chess Master 10th Edition
All of the chess engines from the last few years can whip the pants off of any human ranked less than grand master, so how do you entice anyone to buy a new chess program? Chessmaster 10th Edition's approach is to pack the program with a huge bundle of features aimed at everyone from the neophyte who's looking to learn the basics to the advanced wood pusher who may need practice for tournament play. The result is a very good package that will satisfy most any chess enthusiast.
Download
http://rapidshare.com/files/334703181/SSEHC.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/334700605/SSEHC.part2.rar
No Pass!!!
Link Interchangeable!!!