Making sounds, building models, playing games

Hi there, I'm new here but let's get straight to the point.

sfxr

While browsing through the Ludum Dare contest's blog, I found a nifty little tool which generates 8-bitish sfx, without me having to know anything about sound synthesis. It's called sfxr and was made by Tomas Pettersson. License unknown. You can download it for win32 and *nix (run 'make') systems.

The other awesome thing is the first FreeGameDev.net modelling contest. The mission is to create rts industrial-style buildings under free licenses. The competition ends when February begins. Ironically, I tripped over a similar contest in a forum, where I told about the FGD contest.

Hex-a-hop

Yesterday I realized, that Charlie never mentioned (oh snap he did, under the name Hex-a-pop) the totally awesome puzzle game Hex-a-hop. It's homepage is dead, but the game survived at Debian. I also was able to retrieve a half-broken archive (linux source/build) using the Wayback machine. Try the game or at least give it to your kids!

Charlie once mentioned AstroMenace, but did he tell that Viewizard released it's source and media under the GPL v3? It works like a charm, copying some files, 'cmake .', 'make', './AstroMenace' and I see a game menu with spaceships flying in it's background on my display.

OpenAstroMenace

The game looks sharp and the gameplay is impressive for an top-down (or down-top?) arcade. I also have to mention that my subwoofer likes the explosions' sounds. My neighbours noticed it too.

I sure hope that some arcade freaks will soon take the game and improve it (Menu gui is a bit confusing, levels could contain a bit more diversity, enemies could drop temporary upgrades.) But for now: go get it!