Spacetastic

There's an interview with Ryan Gordon - more well known as icculus - over at Linux Games. I spotted the link over on Linux Gaming World. Whilst he is more associated with commercial "open source" titles [quoted because they usually are not free games, more free engines] it still makes for an interesting read although I'm not too sure I agree with all his assessments on how relevant (or irrelevant) some technologies are to the future of Linux gaming.

Continuing on my spate of reporting on the progress of FreeTrain SE (well, I did campaign for nearly a year to get it ported to English) there's now a tools package up for download to assist in the creation of plugins - almost all the game's features are implemented as plugins.

I heard from a rather good source that the next release of Privateer Gemini Gold is pretty close. They may do one more beta before the final release. Still, with better graphics, refined gameplay, and lots of play testing, this version will really shine and be a standout game for the open source world. :-)

Speaking of space games, I just came across a new one! SFZ (I have no idea what that stands for) looks to be ambitious but, aside from the screenshots/devblog, there's not that much information on the key goals of the game. It will run on Linux and Windows and seems to contain a lot of Privateer-ish gameplay elements, but I get the impression it's designed to be multiplayer i.e. online. Anyway, the game is downloadable but I'm not sure how playable it is.

The SFZ link came from a post in the Free Gamer forums, where one of the SFZ developers [ghoulsblade] is starting a discussion on the concept of applying casual games to open source game developers. Anyway, I thought I'd give others a chance to voice an opinion before weighing in with my rather weighty weighed weighable, er, onion. I mean opinion. :-D

Looking for cutesy spacey graphics for a game? Well, over at lostgarden.com (another game development blog) there's efforts to produce a set of free reusable flexible cute spacish [random adjective] graphics called SpaceCute! Kudos to Ben for pointing it out.

These days I blog so much I sometimes struggle to remember if I have already mentioned something or not. So apologies for any repeats... I got hit in the head a few times today.