Gaming Daily A-Z

Shadow & light mock-up, thrown together by Danc Daniel Cook of Lost Garden started a shadow and light based game prototype challenge . Lost Garden is probably the best thing to read related to gaming. If you would like to participate via an open source project, feel free to gather a team on the FreeGameDev.net forums ! There's some activity surrounding FreedroidRPG . The students Kaisa Anttila, Markku Väisänen and Sami Mylly wrote an usability study of the game and it's editor. The criticism is very general and there are no direct solutions provided. The documents are supposed to serve interested developers in helping improving FreedroidRPG. Version 0.11 of the game is scheduled for... soon? Anyways, for now the 0.11 pre-release candidate is available . Video of Slune , made with glc glc is now my tool of choice when it comes to recording game videos on GNU/Linux systems. It is faster than xvidcap , istanbul or gtk-recordMyDesktop and is also the only app that ma...

Today I gave DccNiTghtmare a try. I learned about the project on the LGT . DccNiTghtmare (aka DNT) is a project to make a Free (as in free speech) 3D single player RPG in a sarcastic post-apocalyptical world. Any suggestions are welcome, just put them at our forum. How convenient! I'm a big fan of apocalyptic settings, single-player games, sarcasm, free software and projects that encourage participation! DccNiTghtmare First impressions after starting: Weird music, strange resolutions limitation, interesting races (Headbanger, Strange Autistic, Mutant Human Cricket, Human Llama). The controls are contumacious and the graphics engine is either slow or unstable (it either crashes or slows down to unplayable speed when I exit the first area.) This means that I can't say much about playability. The clown care seems right though. So if you're into bizarre humor, you should get DNT, just to be able to read the race/class descriptions. XUT screenshot detail DNT is a project by D...

Winning a game of NO NO is a fun little puzzle game [ video ]. It is built on top of LÖVE , which is fairly easy to have for Win and Lin users. Mac builders wanted ! I found a list of open source games for the Mobile Edition of Java. About 25 puzzle/arcade titles, mostly GPL'ed. The Apricot project is ripening with great speed! Further additions to blender have been made and videos of a playable prototype recorded and uploaded. The plan to unleash "real Open Source power" by opening Apricot's code repository has unfortunately not been fulfilled yet. The opinion exists, that a game will be less fun for people who were able to play a development version of it. I don't think this problem is a big one and believe that simply because of the necessity for compiling, most people will wait for an official release. An example of a story-based single-player game with an open Subversion repository is Rastullahs Lockenpracht , a TDE -based 3D RPG. I haven't tried it...

If you have had problems viewing this blog via Internet Explorer, you should not have these problems any more. Many thanks to intelperfectionist for pointing out that css-related issue that we had! FreeCiv, it's sooo pretty (you knew that already, I know...) I recently learned to enjoy FreeCiv very much. It's pretty and fun. It also has a (fairly) new release called Mr. 2.1.5 . FreeCol 0.7.4 has been released. Tremulous 1.2? Visit this page to read how you can help making the next release a reality. By playing! The latest version of LÖVE is now 0.3.1 and a bugfix is coming soon. I can now say with complete confidence that this yet another project is an awesome one. It has style. Check out their forum community . These guys are cool. As you easily can tell, I'm still blinded by LÖVE's stylishness. Oh. And here is a terrible video of some engine demos ! OpenFracas (0.5) now has music and sound. After 15 years of development, Wine reached version 1.0. Wine is not ...

Yesterday the first RubyWeekend ended, which is a two and a half days Ruby game creation competition. The topic was "Pirates Versus Zombies!" Seven contributions were made: kiba's digital piracy parody The CopyPirate [ video ], atiaxi's tbs Port Town [ video ], satoshi's console-based footracer [ video ], jlnr's ZombieSoccarrr [ video ], ippa's Zombie Horde [ video ], jacius' Election Year: Zombies vs. Pirates! [ video ] and trejs' Caribbean Onslaught . The submitted code had to be released under an OSI -approved license and all media under one of the Creative Commons licenses (alternatively public domain for both.) The contest is being hosted on the forums of Rubygame , which is a SDL -based Ruby media library. Most submissions are based on it, some use Gosu . Ninjapix, probably PyDay #2's winner Another competition ended on Saturday: PyDay #2 - a rather fresh 24-hours Python game making contest and the smaller brother of Ludum Dare ,...

HexTD close view Hex Tower Defence is a Java-powered tower defense game inspired by the unfree, flash-based VectorTD . You can play it inside the browser or grab hold of the code and install/compile it with the help of these instructions . Gazelle desktop HexTD uses the SVG Salamander Java vector library. It's author is Mark McKay , who is also working on an animation suite, which supports Scalable Vector Graphics: Gazelle . Gazelle is a movie editor that makes it easy for you to create short keyframed animations on your computer. There are some tutorial videos available. I look forward to playing around with Gazelle, as I'm very interested in using SVGs to create (animated) game media or to even use them directly in games. HexTD gameplay (likely to be found boring ;) - also there's no sound by default)

krank snake, stone, links and anchors krank is a game of dexterity, being somewhere between Breakout and billiard, where the aim of each level is to shove floating stones towards compatible static stones. You control a short chain of stones with your mouse to achieve that. While the game's visual and audible aural style is as simple as the rules are, there is no shortage of variety. Different level layouts provide enough challenge and different gameplay elements (the interactions between different types of floating stones with different types of static stones) are introduced at a reasonable paste. If you find the hardness curve too flat or simply don't like one level: the game permits you to skip one level ahead the last finished one. Another important aspect, which keeps me playing, is the variety of look and sound. Each level has it's own pretty background and there are different sound themes, which give a subtle but very effective feedback of what is happening on the ...

FreeOrion star map detail Cheer, for a new release of the awesomely pretty FreeOrion has seen the light! This time both Windows and GNU/Linux builds are provided . Here are the features: New and updated art (tech icons, nebulae, map stars, etc.) Gassy substance on the map to give galaxies shape Reworked drag-and-drop design screen New ship parts Python AI interface improvements Minor UI improvements Bug fixes Check out the Roadmap to see what to expect from future releases! FreeOrion icon art OpenGL will be required in coming versions (currently it's semi-required). While I know that there are people who have old machines and countries where it's non-trivial to get reasonably fast hardware, I can't say that I blame anyone for using hardware acceleration and even making it a requirement. I think it's rather the job of Libraries to allow programming games which make use of OpenGL and will automatically disable effects and use software rendering when no acceleration is...

In case you're one of those who use youtube as a music player, now you can use it to listen to Wesnoth music . The one-year-old, made-for-university, one-man game project Heroes of Wesnoth has a new release. There's not much to see yet and it's not the first and certainly not the last HoMM clone but I wish it the best of luck. Whatever it will turn out to be, at least it will have great Battle for Wesnoth art. :) Last post I told you about Ardentryst . There's a mute gameplay video , I recommend you to take a look at what the game is like as I see some freshness in it. Bear Factory A new version of the young platform game Plee The Bear has been released. The code has been cleaned and some images were added. It also features the new level editor called "Bear Factory". The next release has been promised for end of June. I think the level editor will make this project much more interesting, especially for game developers of other platform games . l-echo , ...