Pink Pony 1.2.1

Pink Pony 1.2.1

I wanted to write about Pink Pony for a long time, but never came around to it. It's a Tron-like racing game and features hearts, ponies (also ai-controlled ones), graphic shaders and split-screen multiplayer support. Your aim is to collect hearts and to not run into your foes' trails. Last pony standing wins!

Download it for Win32 or as an easy-to-compile source tarball.

Unfortunately, the game does not support older graphics cards. If you are capable and willing to add legacy support, you can find the source repository here. If you have ideas for more features, please post them (or just comment this blog article).

Pink Pony development was not a one-man ride: While the game concept and code is by ginkgo, tornado created the pony model and textured it, then Skorpio added animation to the pony. A sky render by brisingre is used in the game and I contributed two textures to it. Edit: I forgot to add that MCMic programmed the AI and that Renich's music is used.

I believe that Pink Pony now is the best child-friendly open source game, regarding visuals and gameplay. Most free software games friendly for kids I know try to be education software. Then again, maybe I should give Tux Racer another try.

Pink Pony 1.2.1 two-player mode

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Just a small puzzle game update: Zaz 0.2.6

Zaz 0.2.6

Zaz is a puzzle game, a 'clonespiration' of Zuma, one of PopCap's notorious proprietary (casual) games. You are confronted with a stream of differently colored balls and have to put three of the same type next to each other to destroy them. There are power-ups, you're under time pressure, you have to aim, that's fun actually.

The game has nice music and good sounds, though I couldn't find author information on any of the game data. EDIT: Ha, I looked in the source directory, but not on the menu screen! So gfx & sound is by Remigiusz Dybka (who also programmed the game) and I guess it's GPL3-ed. The music tracks are (remixed?) CC-BY-NC-SA Nine Inch Nails music.

What I'm *very* much impressed with is that the game has a in-game menu to create a recording of a game you played! It even captures audio! Usually I use glc for recording video/audio in OpenGL games.

When you record a game using Zaz' internal recorder, it creates a Vorbis/Theora .ogv file. Only problem is that you can't do anything while the recording process (you have to watch the replay, while it records and can't even switch to another window) See an example video that I recorded below.

PS: Since I'm a big wuss when it comes to playing puzzle games in which you have to aim games, I have a wish for Zaz (besides nice background images :) ) and that is to have an indicator, what ball will be affected by me pressing or releasing the mouse button. I don't like aligning the Grappling hook with the balls. :|

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Snippets and whippets

Complete Annihilation

Apparently the Spring mod Complete Annihilation is rather good, although it's about to be renamed and not quite fully free of its ties to the original Total Annihilation content. The goal is to be totally Free. And it's pretty complete(ish) as a game already. There's lots of lovely screenshots.

Glest Advanced Engine 0.2.12 got released. They also got a Sourceforge project for GAE.

Q3Rally

Fun racing games are always, er, fun. Well, in demand as well. So maybe Q3Rally can strike a chord with the Free gaming public? Apparently the original Quake Rally was the best Quake mod ever, although it was never completed and all that is left of it is Quake Rally: Leftovers. There's plenty of maps and cars and it is billed as a mod for OpenArena so should be totally Free. \o/

Here's a promotional video for Q3Rally that makes it look rather ooo aaah:

Dark Phear, a classic Phantasy Star-like RPG, as reported in the Ubuntu forums. Go there for links, screenshots, and more information.

Oolite, the Elite cloney-but-better game, is getting purty with shaders it seems.

The Privateer Gemini Gold team have been fairly quiet but work is ongoing and the next version will contain much better videos / graphics to make it even more immersive. Some of it can be seen on their youtube channel although the videos are currently just very short showcases.

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An example of why a license matters

Simutrans


OpenTTD OpenGFX

Why is OpenTTD now in Fedora 10/11 but Simutrans is not? The former has been only playable with Free media since some time this year - and the media is still incomplete - whereas the latter has been Free for years now? Is it because somebody requested it?

Digging (and by digging I mean Googling) to some it seems that Simutrans media is unclearly licensed. Download the official (currently r102) version of Simutrans and it comes with two licenses - one copy of the 'artistic license' and a 'copyright notice' that states:

"Simutrans may not be sold or modified in any way without
written permission by the author.

Which license applies to which part of the game? I guess you can make assumptions but it really should be clearer. The artistic license applies to the source, the custom NC / no modification license to the media. OpenTTD is about to get many 1000s more players by being in big distributions. Simutrans is going to continue in its role of shadowing OpenTTD by being the transport tycoon game that hardly anybody knows about and it is somewhat self inflicted.

Do you want your Free game to be played by as many people as possible? License it clearly and explicitly, and push for inclusion in mainstream distributions. And don't use a custom, restrictive license. Go with something that is compatible with mainstream distributions like a creative commons license.

• I covered Simutrans and OpenTTD in more detail in an article on Free tycoon & city building games.


• There's a more in-depth comparison of the two games by Danny Stable who digs deeper than me and sides favourably with Simutrans.

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Update 379

Todays date is 07/08/09 if you're not a silly yank (m/d/y wha'?) and it made me think about how long the blog has been going. 379 posts... quite a lot! It's been a while since I started doing this blog. Who knows how far it'll go before life moves on, eh?

I originally started out to make a place that documented all the worthwhile Free software game projects. I stumbled a bit along the way - the original version of the blog (for those who don't remember) had a nice list down the side. Now we just have this broken old page that is too much of a PITA to edit and update. Hopefully one day I'll find the time and energy to sort it out properly.

Without a good central resource* of worthwhile projects, it can be easy for things to get lost in the Internet haze. People complain about a lack of polished FOSS games but there's more out there than you realise, even if some are still in active development. Then there's those that probably fell by the wayside because they just failed to penetrate the public view.

Update: as commentor Bram points out, Libregamewiki is a pretty decent resource, although not ideal - it misses comments, ratings, tagging, features to make it easier to get straight to the content you are looking for.

Update2: there is also the list of Complete open source games on the FreeGameDev wiki, but this omits many projects that are very promising and playable.

Shotgun Debugger is a fun, polished, top down GTA-style action game. It's well done, although I didn't get too far, because I'm a busy bee y'know.

People often lament the lack of FOSS single player 3D RPGs. Arbarlith II happens to be one of those although I haven't played it so have no idea how well done or how deep or how long the game is. It looks interesting though!

Lips of Suna is a very ambitious MORPG (not typo). If beautiful graphics and destructible voxel terrain don't appeal to you, then the developer focusing on gameplay must be applauded.

Grumbel's Mech

Linwarrior 3D is a mech warrior game that's been in slow and steady development since 1999. The mech models are a bit low detail, but it is a playable game. The website is one ad-ridden atrocity with no recent information on it, and no screenshots of the later versions other than some mosaic.

Qubodup put together a video of it.

I wonder if they know of and could make use of Grumbel's mech model and his other FreeMech concepts?

Speaking of long running projects, the Combat Simulator Project seems quite active at the moment (look at the project page and forums). Love planes? Love fighter planes? Get involved.

Knights (or Amiga Knights if happypenguin.org is to be believed) is a 2 player action/quest game. It looks fun, I might try to play it with my son some time.

Crimson Space

Crimson Space is a very interesting looking Elite-style 3D space trading game. Sadly development seems to have ceased circa 2002, but not before the developer implemented the ability to enter the atmosphere of planets and skim the oceans. This is the first time I encountered this game and purely by chance (linked as a 'similar project' on a Sourceforge project of mine). It's a shame development stopped and you have to wonder, if it had the kind of buzz Vega Strike has enjoyed, where it might be now had development been ongoing.

If I ever do a sequel to the Top 10 Projects To Revive (I'm collecting another list) then Crimson Space is sure to be in it.

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Clonk open sourced and Free Gamer ceil(foss games)

Clonk

Clonk got open sourced! Welcome OpenClonk. Clonky! It seems to be the indie game fashion at the moment what with 0AD and all. What is Clonk?

Clonk is a multiplayer-action-tactic-skill game. It is often referred to as a mixture of The Settlers and Worms.

So, the Clonk developers open sourced it, but since backwards compatability is a big problem for them, they ditched all Clonk content and are asking the community to contribute new game content. Judging by the forum, the community looks very active, it's a case of 'watch this space' I guess.

The above video is the "Clonk Rage" trailer. I got the impression this is what has been open sourced although I'm not sure how of the levels/content came with it, if at all. Perhaps somebody could check out the source and see where it is up to?

Anyhoo... so, Ceil... round up... get it?

Despite the lack of Free Gamer activity, the FOSS game scene is as active as ever.

Some new releases that should have been mentioned earlier:

• Unknown Horizons 2009.1 (announcement)
  
  Many improvements over the 2009.0 release, new UI, multilanguage support, music, game features


• Egoboo 2.7.4 (announcement)
  
  Lots of features, updates, and bug fixes - should be getting pretty good now


• Project Football 0.2 (FGD announcement)
  
  Consecutive seasons, UI updates, AI updates, but still a Spanish-only website although English secions in their forum


• Legend of Edgar 0.20 0.22 (FGD announcement)
  
  Compatibility with 64 bit CPUs, 2 additional maps and a new boss


• Stone Soup 0.5 (LinuxGames announcement)
  
  Its got graphics but is also the winner of the 2009 Ascii Dreams Roguelike of the Year award


• And last but not least: Yo Frankie! 1.1 (announcement)
  
  Includes the 3 winning levels from the level design competition, with additional improvements

I probably should make more of a fuss over Yo Frankie! than I do - it does look absolutely stunning as you can see in the following video - and it could yet become an important starting platform for creating other types Free games using it's materials and gameplay as a foundation:

Well, so, that's some stuff we already knew about, but what about some things we don't?

Skyscraper: A first-person 3D virtual building simulator. Perhaps not a game. I report, you decide.

Wesnoth + Bloodbowl + a blender = Wesbowl! It's early days (0.1 alpha) but good to see somebody having a bash.

Grandwing is a game being developed to be similar in gameplay to the game Spyro the Dragon.

And world's worst website award goes to... *drumroll* ...ok, I'm not going to say its the worst, but the site for YSFlight (an open source flight sim) has to be a contender.

Toodlepip!

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Interview: Stephen Carlyle-Smith aka Me_Programmer

In the second Free Gamer interview - over 2 years since the first with grumbel - serial Free game developer Steven Carlyle-Smith (UK) aka Me_Programmer Games aka Steve16384 was kind enough to take the time to reply in detail to my questions about his development activities.

Steve has created a plethora of Free games over the years. Whilst they have struggled to gain mindshare - usually he moves on at speed to new projects before completing others - there's a lot of content to peruse and I thought his experiences were more than worth tapping for advise to budding game developers. He has created all his games with little or no community help other than occasionally reusing resources from other projects. He also maintains blog on his development efforts which is often witty.

You can ask questions / get support / give feedback for Steve's games in the new FreeGameDev forum for Me_Programmer Games. There you can also find an exhaustive list of his playable game projects, including several not mentioned here.

He is also responsible for coding/creating the site Online Game Planner - which he uses to host his projects - which is a fairly new portal for organizing multiplayer gaming sessions.

The game that originally got my attention was Laser Tactics - previously called Nuclear Graveyard, which he talks about later in the interview. So, without further ado...

The Interview

Q. Please introduce yourself...

I'm a 30-something professional applications programmer, amateur games programmer, married with one child and another on the way.

Q. What do you do for a living?

I work for a small company writing software for businesses. Everything from web applications, social networking sites, VB apps, web filters, stock control software, networking tools, and the odd game. Whatever people will pay for!

Q. What notable games have you created?

I don't think any qualify as notable -- editor is impressed with the humility, some of the games are good they just haven't hit the right public spot yet! -- but these are probably my best:-

Xenogeddon (home)

This is a simple FPS based on Space Hulk, but I'm very pleased at how the graphics turned out. I didn't do any of the models, but overall it captures the Space Hulk imagary quite well. It is small and simple however, and needs a lot more scenery and features adding to keep the player's interest.

Laser Tactics (home)

The less said about the graphics the better, but this is my attempt at making a pseudo-realtime verson of Laser Squad and have tried to recreate the original graphics in 3D. It uses what I think is a unique system where both side's "action points" are replenished in real time which can make for interesting gameplay. I'm also particularly pleased with the AI as well. The overall presentation could do with a damn good polishing though.

Island Commander (home)

This is my most recent game and I'm still working on it, but it's fully playable and I enjoy playing it. I've always liked strategy games, and this one is a simple RTS/RTT where the player builds units and then watches them do battle. I'm interested in games where you only have indirect control. I've got loads of ideas yet to implement, like different races, more unit types, and maybe a better name!

Q. Of your game projects, which is your favourite?

At the moment it's Island Commander, because it's my newest and I still enjoy playing it. I'm probably most proud of Xenogeddon though, in that if someone asked me to show them one of my games, that would be the one.

Q. Excluding your own, what is your favourite open source game?

I don't spend that much time playing games, but the one I used to play the most is Tremulous, probably because it's multi-player with a big player-base. I'm crap at it though.

Q. What games do you play at the moment, FLOSS or commercial?

Definitely FLOSS, as I haven't bought a game since X-Com for the Amiga! My home PC isn't up to playing modern games and I don't have time anyway. I'd much rather be programming games than playing them. When I do play games, it's usually simple but addictive Flash-type games. And if they're very simple, I then have a go at writing my own version.

Q. How did you get into games programming?

Way back in 1984, my dad bought a ZX Spectrum, and the book "First Steps with your Spectrum" to go with it. Ever since then I've been programming, for the Spectrum, Amiga and then PC. I like to think my games have improved since then.

Q. What are your best games programming tips?

Re-use your own code as often as possible. Have something playable as quickly as possible. And use descriptive var/function names. I don't agree with people who dislike verbose var/function names; if you're sharing code with others (or coming back to your own project after a 6 month gap) you need as much description as possible. With tools like code-completion, long names aren't a problem.

Q. What draws you to open source, what is your Free software philosophy?

I particularly like the way that we all provide each other with programming help and actual source code, which enables everyone to learn and produce software much faster than they would be able to otherwise. It's a shame that in the corporate world, when somebody learns something, it's top secret and usually patented. Just think how advanced technology (not just software) might be if everyone shared their knowledge and skills with everyone else.

Q. What are the things to avoid, the things that make FLOSS game
development fail?

The biggest problem is not getting something playable as quickly as possible. Whether its a one-man project or bigger, people soon get bored of discussing and planning everything to death. You need to show yourself and everyone that you are actually doing something practical that is actually possible and progress is being made. There are a million "Status: 1-Planning" projects on Sourceforge as a testament to this.

Q. If you could take one abandoned FLOSS game and restore it's
development (excluding your own titles!) which would it be?

I don't really know any off the top of my head. I sometimes browse Sourceforge to see if there's anything I can help with, but I usually end up with ideas and inspiration to write a game of my own! Unfortunately, trying to understand someone else's source code and designs (especially the larger ones) is often harder than just writing my own project.

Q. What are your future game development plans and which of your games
do you hope to see come to fruition in the near future?

My dream is to have a game (and more importantly, a community) as popular as, say, Starcraft. This is my ultimate (and obviously unattainable) ambition, but if one of my games can get a thousandth of the popularity of that, then I'll be more than pleased!

Steve's Other Game Projects

You can ask questions / get support / give feedback for Steve's games in the new FreeGameDev forum for Me_Programmer Games. There you can also find an exhaustive list of his playable game projects, including several not mentioned here.

Danger Man




HoloRacer

Danger Man (home)

This is my contribution to the saturated market of platformers. It's reasonably complete, but requires more levels designing and it's own set of graphics. It has a few good features though, like different weapons.

Metal Glove Solid (home)

This is a playable but limited version of Gauntlet. The advantage of having this in my repotoire is that if I want to make any other top-down 2D game, I can just start with this. I do that with a lot of my games, meaning I can usually knock something up very quickly. I just need to improve the graphics and create more levels.

HoloRacer (home)

I'm quite pleased with this one, and I sometimes go back and have a quick game. I just wanted to write the fastest racer that I could, and it was my first game using OpenGL. It's deliberately quite simple (in gameplay and graphics) but fun in short bursts. I seem to remember that when I uploaded it to Sourceforge, it got about 200 downloads on the first day. They'v trailed off a bit since then!

Realtime Chaos (home)

This is a remake of "Chaos - The Battle of Wizards" for the Spectrum, where wizards do battle with various spells, but converted into an RTS. I've written countless version of Chaos over the years, but this is by far the least-worst. The only drawback is that it has no AI, so you need at least one other player and a LAN to play a game.

Simwar (home)

This is an RTS in the style of C&C. It's quite simple, and also multi-player/LAN only, but is designed to be quick and fun to play. It has some features like proper line-of-sight (unlike just fog-of-war), so you can only see the enemy if you have a clear view. Prizes for guessing which game the soldier sprites came from!

GTA-MUD (home)

As the name says, this is a MUD. I liked the contemporary setting of GTA, and thought a MUD in the same setting would be a good idea, where you could do anything in a modern-day realistic setting rather than either medeival fantasy or futuristic. It's quite small, but gets about 5 logins a day. It's also quite "adult" in some sections, just like GTA.

Online Game Planner (home)

This is a website I produced. I think this was inspired by me trying to get more players on at the same time on GTA-MUD. The premise is simple - you select an online games that you play, and then organise a session by date and time. Everyone else who has also marked that game as one they play then gets informed of the date and time, so everyone plays the game at the same time. It also hosta a few of my simple applet games. I think I should rename it "MultiplayerGamePlanner".

The Last Word

I'd really like to see Steve polish some of his older games a bit more and be more astute with advertising them. Some of them are very hard to come by unless you go through his blog, so posting announcements/showcase/help-wanted threads in the appropriate forums (starting with the FreeGameDev forums) should increase their visibility.

Xenogeddon looks full of potential and it'd be good to see what people make of it. I don't have functional 3D so couldn't try it myself yet.

Metal Glove Solid could become a popular game if he worked on performance (it was unplayably slow on my graphically-unaccelerated 2ghz laptop) as well as used the better graphics available in the Gauntlet Resurrection thread from the FreeGameDev ideas forum.

There's a lot of projects that he didn't mention because he feels they're not complete enough, e.g. this Shadowfire remake. It makes me curious to know if there's a complete list of Steve's projects anywhere! See update!

Sometimes the life of a Free game developer can feel a bit lonely because of the lack of exposure. Hopefully some of you will go away and try his games and, even if you don't end up playing them for long, at least give some decent feedback so he can work to make them better and increase player retention.

Update: Steve has posted a complete list in the forum. Two games he has made that he didn't mention in the interview but are worthwhile projects are Passenger and Last Remaining. I think he needs a bit of modelling help to really realise the potential of Last Remaining.

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0 A.D. Now Open Source

Some breaking, amazing news related to one of the most exciting freeware Free game projects on the indie scene:

What is 0 A.D.?

0 A.D. is a free, cross-platform, under-development, 3D, historically-based, real-time strategy game.

What are you doing?

Switching from a closed development process to open source: making the code available as GPL and the art content available as CC-BY-SA, and encouraging external contributions. We've been working on 0 A.D. in our free time for years, and now we want to show what we've achieved and make it easier for more people to get involved.

How can I get started?

See the Getting Started guide to find more information about the game, forums for discussion, instructions for building and running the game, and links to further details.

For the full announcement, see the dedicated page for explaining why they moved to open source from the closed development model. For more media and information on the game, go to the official 0 A.D. website.

This is, of course, an exciting development. This game has been in production of some form for nearly 8 years, has 150k lines of code in the engine, and hundreds of dedicated (and now shared) models. It will be very interesting to gauge the impact this has on the open source game community. The game itself is not yet complete but it's definitely more than a tech demo, so it will also be interesting to see if the move to open source galvanises the project and gives it the push that it needs to get to a more complete/playable state.

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Berusky, Overgod, and Allegro

Berusky

Berusky - Stuck!

Berusky is a "free logic game". It's a puzzle game of Sokoban-like gameplay with a few extra twists. You have control of up to 5 bugs, and you must collect 5 silver keys on each level before you can exit it. You can push explosives into barrels, and destroy boulders with pick axes that you collect. Throw in one-way gates, coloured gates and coloured keys, and gates for specific colour bugs and there's a lot of potential obstacles and some wickedly tricky levels.

The graphics are nice. There's no music. The game has not been fully translated into English, so some of the level hints (well, most of them) are appearing in Czech(?). And it's bloody hard. As hard as Fish Fillets (Free Gamer review), if not harder. (Interestingly, Fish Fillets is also Czech produced.) I couldn't work out how to beat *the first level on intermediate or the 3rd level on easy. The interface outside of the game isn't that great - using passwords for levels which are easy to forget to note down - it could really do with a Fish Fillets style map.

Update: Ok the first level on intermediate wasn't that hard, I was just being a bit daft... I was looking for a complex solution when (if you look at the screenshot) there was a simple way to finish the level.

Gondola looks curious. A PyWeek game, "Gondola is the ultimate shipping, shape sorting, barge unloading game of all time. Get the right shapes to the right places to score. But be warned: there are only a limited number of islands to build on and longer cables are expensive! Sort wisely to minimize loss." It sounds intriguing and original but I couldn't run it due to some idiotic Linux issues.

Overgod

The other day I stumbled across a game I'd previously enjoyed but forgotten, Overgod. It's a good, solid shoot 'em up which plays well and has polished albeit simple abtract graphics.

Digging a bit, I see that Overgod (2008) is an evolution of Lacewing (2006), which features similar gameplay but the enemies and levels tend to be a bit more basic and is not quite as polished.

Linley Henzell, the author of Overgod and Lacewing, has been busy. Other games include White Butterfly and Garden of Coloured Lights which both looked good although are currently only working on Windows.

Another Linley Henzell game which looks intriguing - but is DOS only! - is Captain Pork's Revenge, a Leiro/Teeworlds style 2D deathmatch game.

The Allegro Depot has a lot more entries than I would have thought, including Open Sonic and Worminator 3.

There's Zelda Classic which is a clone of the original Zelda, as well as a platform for building Zelda-like games.

Worms for Linux! is one that I should add to the Open Source Artillery/Worms Clones article.

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Some Puzzle Games

FreeTumble is yet another "destroy adjacent same-color bricks" puzzle game but one of the better-looking and -sounding ones. Three modes of gameplay are provided, they can be seen as variation of the same game for different types of puzzle players or different hardness modes.

FreeTumble - I much like that there is a credits screen

Biniax-2 is an original puzzle game in which colors also play a role and which also is stronger on the visual side than your typical open source Tetris clone. It features a turn-based and continuous mode. The latter can be played with two players in a versus-game.

Biniax-2 (no sound)

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection will help you if you're bored at the office or similar.

CreepSmash is a java-based multiplayer tower defense game. Have some videos of it too!

26 June 06:09 UTC PS: RubyWeekend #3 with the theme "A Tiny World" started a few hours ago. It's a 3-day open source ruby game programming competition.

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Turn up the juice!

Go Ollie

An open source platformer I missed yesterday is Go Ollie. It's easy to overlook, I mean, worms are not exactly a glamorous topic. Whilst I'm not sure about the license (somebody care to check? I'm busy!) the game itself is polished and fun. The controls are different to your typical platformer, where instead of moving and jumping your character directly, you select where he moves to with the mouse. Places that can be reached are highlighted, so it's about picking the right path and having the reflexes to do it quickly enough, which can be tricky on scrolling levels.

It seems to be a gift to the Linux community from game makers Tweeler. The graphics and presentation look professional. It's a great game for kids as well as a fun time waster for adults.

<update> Actually Go Ollie is by Charlie Dog Games, but Tweeler acts as a download host for the Mac/Linux version. Also, it is definitely open source - code is GPLv3 and artwork CC-by-sa with exceptions for logos. </update>

VDrift

There's a new release of VDrift, the open source drift racing game. Version 2009-06-15 is a significant release for the project which sees it re-emerge from a massive refactor as a better game than before the refactoring began. Here's a list of the major changes since the last release, which was after the refactored code stabilized:

• cars collide with each other in Single Race mode now


• AI is capable of much faster driving now, so added a difficulty slider


• off-road tire spin sound support (thanks to slowdan!)


• support for H-gate shifters


• improved performance


• lots of huge bugs fixed, especially car physics bugs

TORCS

In other racing game news, the TORCS Endurance World Championship 2009 was recently held. The full report found on a participants blog. From what I can gather, it's a long distance race (500km) where people enter their own robot drivers to see how they fare.

Base Command is a fully finished OGRE mini-game. It's a straightforward 3D protect-your-base game, where you shoot down incoming planes. What is interesting is the author has provided an analysis of the game code which would help people who are learning how to program.

Scourge map

My favourite Free software game Scourge enjoys continued progress. There's now an artistic map of the large island that is the game world. There's more information to be found in the 28th "Scourge Weekly" that tracks major developers on an almost-weekly basis. They are still looking for contributors.

There's also more juicy updates on PARPG progress. That project is looking very promising and they are working their way towards their first demo release. Given the coordination and generally high activity of that project, I'm optimistic there'll be something solidly playable before the end of the year. Our own Q put together a video showing where they are currently up to:

Other interesting updates are:

• Lips of Suna's second release, version 0.0.2, which introduces destructible voxel terrain. Lips of Suna aims to be an innovative 3D online dungeon crawl.


• The first beta of Leges Motus, a kind of gravityless 2D multiplayer shoot-em-up.


• A new Palomino release, a lovely looking 3D flight simulator - see this Free Gamer article for more flight sims.

There's probably more... feel free to add updates in the comments below!

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Platformer roundup

I thought I'd check out how Super Tux development is going. I grabbed the lastest svn, compiled, and performance was so abominable that it took me a minute just to quit. It didn't help that it was placed half-off the screen (probably because I have a dual screen setup) Super Tux used to run fine. I'll hold my hands up and say I'm using an nvidia chipset and the open source driver without any significant OpenGL Acceleration, but it's a 2D game. I hope they work on some kind of OpenGL-less fallback.

Mole Invasion

One little-known but very promising platformer is Mole Invasion. The website is mainly in French, but there is a dedicated English page. The game language defaults to English. The current release is version 0.4, and the first thing you notice is the Mario-like logo; obviously the inspiration for the gameplay. The second thing you notice is the performance - it runs great. It's really smooth, the animations are good, the characters move well, and there's plenty of variation. A lot of the levels are obviously made with testing in mind, and some of the graphics are still a bit raw, but otherwise it was a fun experience.

Mole Invasion feels like it is headed in the direction that Super Tux should have been. I can't help but feel that Super Tux development has significantly lost it's way. The first few post-GotM releases of Super Tux were very promising, and very well received. That was now several years ago, and little has changed for the better, some questionable decisions (move to OpenGL), and new milestones seem on the other end of a development void.

The Legend of Edgar

There's a new Parallel Realities game out. The Legend of Edgar is a platform game with a fantasy setting. I had a go with 0.1, which is playable with a single player storyline. For me, it suffers from the same issues I have with Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid - the movement is just way too slow. It takes many minutes to navigate levels to the point that exploring a level is just tedious as you wait for your character to amble his way around.

Remember Frogatto is a old-style platformer starring an anthropomorphic frog, championed by the lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth? It celebrates pixels and thrives on cute blocky graphics. There are updated Frogatto builds for Windows and Mac from the weekend, although pious Linux users must compile from source. I couldn't compile it. I had previously, and it was looking promising! Anybody else managed to compile it on Fedora?

Widelands

The next version of Widelands - based on the classic RTS gameplay of Settlers II - is fast approaching. "Build 14" will come with GGZ support, making it much easier to find multiplayer opponents. Map auto-generation, lots of other small enhancements, more campaigns and a better beta testing phase should make this the Widelands release well worth playing.

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What planet are you on?

Wesnoth Knight

Battle for Wesnoth continues to get stupendously good art contributions such as this series of Loyalist portraits.

Hot on the heels of Extreme Tux Racer 0.5beta, contributor and original Tux Racer developer Erin has introduced his rewrite to the world. Tentatively named Bunny Hill, the rewrite has a better design resulting in better performance, nicer graphics (in some ways, lesser in others) and more features. It looks like it will probably become ETR 0.6 once the dust has settled.

PARPG Weapons

PARPG is back from the dead. 3 weeks not blogging being 'dead' apparently. The project itself is thriving, with plenty of graphical creativeness whilst the coders assess their options for developing the game.

Unknown Horizons will have a new release very soon!

Widelands is getting randomly generated maps.

Simutrans Subways

It looks like Simutrans is getting subways, at least pak96.comic is anyway. Subterranean!

There'll be loads more updates to your favourite Free games but I don't have my finger on the pulse as much as I used to, so...

...so...

...post them in the comments!

Update: the FreeOrion project released version 0.3.13 and it has a huge changelog.

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Fellow adventurer, turn back while you can!

Crikey, it's been a while. What can I say, life gets busy, and games sometimes just can't be a priority. I know, it's crazy talk. I meditated long and hard, facing many demons, moments of utter despair, but I couldn't get past the conclusion that sometimes Free Gamer won't be on my list of things to do. Fortunately Q has been on top of things so it's not silent when I'm off the radar.

Today is a temporary reprieve, brought on somewhat by enjoying the current development pace of the Scourge project. Timong, of JCRPG fame, has been taking a break from Java coding to indulge in his new found passion for music composition. You can listen to the new main theme music he has composed for Scourge, one of many he has contributed lately. I think it sounds pretty damn good. Meanwhile you can now roam around a massive persistent outdoor world in Scourge, with generated villages and NPCs as well as varying climate and weather conditions. It all sounds quite impressive.

IVAN

On another dungeoneering frontier, Iter Vehemens ad Necem (aka IVAN) is probably the most challenging and addictive nethack variant I ever played. (Although I only ever played a couple.) It has surprisingly good 2d graphics, which aren't done justice by the screenshot, but alas development stalled after 2005. The IVAN community seems to be filling the void left by the developers who[se motivation] seem[s] to have met some kind of gruesome demise - perhaps their brains turned into banana flesh by a vindictive god.

There is the IVANX project which seems to pull together a lot of the popular community contributions, and should be more likely to compile on Linux. There's also LIVAN which stands for Linux IVAN, thus should compile on Linux. Neither compiled for my Fedora laptop, somewhat thankfully as it means I can't play it and thusly be more productive! \o/

IVAN 3D

Of extra interest is IVAN 3D which turns it into a bit of a funky pixelated adventure. There's obviously quite a few challenges to overcome when transposing a totally 2D described game into a 3D world without it looking a bit other-worldly. Still, I don't think pixels are a bad thing. After all, it's a game, not a life simulation!

OWS

Hey look, Open World Soccer is moving steadily towards being a modern Sensible Soccer clone. Impressive looking! However the AI doesn't do too much yet, just keeping the two teams level with the ball.

Raidem is one of those vertical scrolling shooters, a nice classic pixel explosion fest. It is surprisingly well done, but it's also bloody hard - I never survived more than 20-30s. From the intro screen, it looks like the author needs an additional graphic designer but other than that it's a very nice looking game. No development since 2006 though so I guess it's to be taken as-is.

Another game that is surprisingly well done is Abe's Amazing Adventure. It looks weird, really weird. However the animations are very smooth and the game plays pretty well, far better than it looks. Still, I couldn't quite get over the game's oddness.

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idTech engine game news

Tremfusion is a fork of Tremulous, that wants to be more open in development. There's more to read on its organization and philosophy (too many words for my taste). One of the most noticeable changes is the use of the Xreal as the game engine. Thanks to Julius for letting us know.

An audio interview with Quake2World's lead coder reveales details about improvements in his graphics and physics engine. (I don't like podcasts usually but this one is pretty interesting.)

An audio interview of Lee Vermeulen, founder of the Nexuiz project, was published on the new site Open Gaming Now. The audio unfortunately is of a not-so-good telephone line quality and the added music makes it even a little bit harder to listen. Lee tells about the early history of the project, but other than that it's mainly a introduction to Nexuiz.

The rest & snippets

Voxelstein

Andrewj, one of the best Let's Play artists, has recently recorded a playthrough of Voxelstein, the Wolfenstein3D-inspired shooter with voxels (you can destroy everything) which unfortunately is win-only. Here's the video.

Palomino flight simulator release 20090511 adds shaders to the game.

Boomwar Nitro 0.1b1 has been released [win32 binary] (after 2.5 years of no releases, but some svn activity). It appears to be using the non-free Newton Game Dynamics lib, so I refrained from compiling it.

Last time I mentioned PopCap Framework. Now I found out about PyCap, a python wrapper for the PopCap framework. Thanks to GBGames for passively helping me find this. :)

Slick is a LWJGL-based Java game lib, which even supports SVG (not completely though). Some of these games make use of slick and two of them are supposedly free software. (I haven't searched for the source much though).

There's a first screenshot of Nethack_3D.

Hey, what do Glest, Freeciv, FreeCol, FreedroidRPG, FlightGear, Nexuiz, OpenArena, Sauerbraten, SuperTux, SuperTuxKart, Warsow and Yo Frankie have in common? - All of them are being STOLEN by reckless PIRATES. ARR!

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Sauerbraten Trooper Edition, first playable Mark IV network Demo

Sauerbraten [more screens]

Cube 2: Sauerbraten Trooper Edition has been released [download]: new logo, new maps, new weapon looks, bots! (from BloodFrontier), movie recording function (I have to check this out ASAP), rag dolls, new music, and so much more.

Sauerbraten characters

The bots are rather dumb as of now and don not know what a powerup is yet but they're definitely better than no bots at all. What I found most amazing about this release is the characterization of the player models. Each of the three has a little back story. I felt that Sauerbraten had no soul before this release. Now it has a little soul. :)

Mark IV

The tank simulation engine Mark IV [project, web page, blog] v0.80 Alpha-1 is out and first-time playable over network. It however uses FMOD (which can be avoided, see this) and RakNet. Windows users will be able to use the pre-compiled binary.

A little arcade

Atomic Worm has recently been open sourced. It appears to be a Pacman-Snake mix plus different grid types plus the visual style of Transcend. Source available here. It uses the PopCap Framework, which appears to be free software.

Atomic Worm at YouTube

Do you like cruel, hard moon lander games? If yes, OldSkoolGravityGame was made with you in mind! It may look harmless, even retro-pretty on video... but I have felt the pain...
O_O

Portable game packages

DSN

The Damn Small Nexuiz (DSN) project provides a slim version of Nexuiz with the aim to make it playable on netbooks. Deja Vu?

Speaking of reduced weight: Spring RTS Engine Portable is a win32 Spring (RTS engine) package that doesn't touch the registry.

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Quick & Dirty FLOSS Game Updates

== Insert introductory text here ==

Strategy games

Civitas city

Civitas is a project of a colaborative educational game, where children from schools can cooperate in a network for the construction of cities.

This sounds/looks like a multiplayer OpenCity. Civitas is a GPLed project written in Java.

Thumbs up to kid/education-related game projects whose creators are brave enough to use standard free licenses!

Clippers

Clippers is a board game designed by Alan R Moon that is an abstract island connection game based on clipper ships and the south pacific. This computer version is written in Java 1.5 and includes AI players.

Just like Civitas, I wasn't able to give it a spin. Sorry, Java issues. :(

The Spring Engine has a nice new homepage and a pleasantly clear list of games. (This is probably very old news but kind of new to me.) I was told that Kernel Panic is a 100% open source game for Spring, but unfortunately I am either too stupid or too lazy to make it work. :|

Role-playing games

FreedroidRPG 0.12.1 has been released [download]. The main game map has been re-organized to make more plot-sense. It does, but too many gameplay-useless rooms full of stasis chambers have been added. To my feel, the game is now a lot harder too. However, the controls feel slightly better compared to the last time I tried it. Unfortunately I experienced annoying laggy map-loading and a few crashes from playing too many sounds at once (might have to do with my sofware mixer though). Check out the full changelog for more details.

Rigged FreedroidRPG armor

I noticed that FreedroidRPG's image sources (.blend and .svg files) have been uploaded. an unsorted heap of everything visual that is used in the game [archive tree]. I must say that I like the graphics much better in high resolution. 3D game developers eying this pack will be glad to hear that everything that needs rigging is rigged. For 2D game devs, there is a rendering guide.

Cheese Boys [remember?] is still in development - and still looking for artist help... though maybe someone to scout OpenGameArt would even be enough?..

Ardentryst is being constantly developed - the 1.7 release was added three weeks ago.

Eating daggers in Radakan

Radakan 0.0.1, which can be currently described as "young Qt GUI-driven text RPG", was released. Future plans include graphical clients and such. Creating a system to allow writing the story/gameplay before starting work on a graphical engine is a playing-it-safe decision. IMHO a good idea.

The WorldForge client Ember now has real-time shadows [announcement].

Worldforge Ember, real time shadows

By the way, WorldForge is in the Google Summer of Code 2009. [GSOC page] as are some other game or gamedev-related projects, as seen in this list.

Game makers/tools

Dungeon Mapper

Dungeon Mapper is yet another tile map editor.

Mokoi Gaming 0.4 was released. It now supports OSX and contains a Tetris variant [changelog].

Development on Opensource Game Studio has started. Features: 3D, Qt, Lua. It contains a small glxgears-like demo [video]. Nothing to see here yet. :)

The rest

The two-day game programming competition Ludum Dare #14 has ended a while ago. Unfortunately nobody except arcticum's and Flood of Air's authors cared to release their game as open source software (or I couldn't find them).

Armagetron Advanced 0.2.8.3_rc2 [download] fixes color filters and crashes. [changelog].

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