Gaming Daily A-Z

Blood and Iron menu Blood and Iron "is a dark low fantasy tactical RPG where you attempt to lead a mercenary company to fame and fortune." This sounds like a Mount & Blade demake  [EDIT] but it's not! Dark low fantasy theme  You play the owner of a mercenary company, the characters on the battlefield are just employees  Your goal is to make your mercenary company the most famous one in history, and to complete various special challenges (achievements)  Yes, you really won't save the world this time  Tactical (actual combat) and strategic (resource management) layer  Turn-based, of course  Ironman only, no girlie man reloading whenever something goes wrong here  Yes, when characters die they are gone - forever  It is written in SDL and supposed to be portable. So far (the project is one day old at time of writing) there is only a win32 binary (runs on linux using wine) available for download which features an incomplete menu an...

Three more days, 688 more US Dollars pledged to the Portrait Marathon and we get art video tutorials (so spread a little word, why don'tcha? ;) ): Fantasy Portrait Marathon pledge progress OGA's presents There has been a *LOT* of giving on OGA lately, two fully rigged 3d character models for example. Another present: IOFORMS' (aka iosketch) first alpha release is being prepared. Please let us know in the comments if you notice are any special present-ish foss game releases. :)

Zero-K: Zero-K is the reboot of Spring RTS game Complete Annihilation, with aims to distance itself from the TA IP that has plagued Spring games, and just generally be better in every way :) It comes with a revamped UI, multiple specialist commander units to play as, and a single faction instead of the traditional 2. The team is also providing a set of web services such as map and mission lists to enhance the experience, and maybe we'll even see the resurgence of Planet Wars, the awesome persistent galactic RTS that was running a while back IrrRPG Builder IrrRPG Builder looks like a promising 3D RPG IDE. So far, it features a terrain editor, drag and drop object placement, and scriptable using Lua. There's a set of tutorials to get you started, and comes with enough content to play around with; the scriptable object system along with template scripts make it really beginner friendly. The built-in script validator could use a bit of work (doesn't detect undefined functi...

Not very X-mas like at my current place of residence, but there are just so many good things coming to the FreeGamer enthusiast right now! But I am short on time and on a crappy internet connection... so only text for you guys tonight :p So, as a follow up the the recently mentioned Alpha 0.3 release of 0AD and their donation drive, UbuntuGamer has now published a pretty nice interview with one of the 0AD contributors . Their donation drive is also still running, so if you have some money to spare, head over here . They are still a long way from the target, so don't be shy :) ZeroBallistics 2.0 So why is there an early X-mas? Well I just got the hot news that there has been a 2.0 release of the ZeroBallistics FOSS game !!! Definity some nice new features, but have a look at their release announcement yourself here . War§ow 0.6 and AlienArena2011 Two pretty big releases also, but since I always get snubbed a bit for mentioning these games with non-FOSS media around here I will mak...

FLARE logo OSARE is now FLARE . From an OGA tread: I sent an email to Richard Stallman asking if he's interested in supporting Justin Nichol's Creative Commons Fantasy Portrait Project . He pointed out that the difference between "open source" and "free" or "free/libre" and noted this: "However, if you decide to describe it "free" or "free/libre" instead of "open source", then I would be honored to participate." Stallman's lectures are what convinced me in the first place to use the GPL for my work, and to be interested in copyleft licenses in general. I'm quite honored that he answered my email at all, and I agree with his reasoning. IOSKETCH visual programming IOSKETCH is a cross-platform visual authoring tool for games. It is written in Common Lisp. Summoning Wars 0.5.3 The new version SumWars 0.5.3 is out: Upgrade to Ogre 1.7 and CEGUI 0.7 More art and story content Russian translation See the...

Forget my last post about terrain generators! I'm just going to let the screen/video talk for themselves. Lithosphere is a GPU driven terrain generator. It allows you to create and export material textures and heightmaps intended for use in realtime graphics applications. All terrain algorithms are implemented as GLSL fragment shaders operating on floating point textures. This allows realtime modification of the terrain. A graph of nodes is evaluated in order to arrive at the terrain output. License: AGPL Requirement: 32bit python2.6 (:|), a modern graphics card Tested on: Windows, Linux The creator's blog might be of interest to you as well. The last few articles cover OpenGL and HTML5/JavaScript Canvas.

The fantasy portrait marathon reached first base. I just wanted to let you know. Remember, that if it reaches $3000 ($9000!!!/3), we will get a massive instructional video!

Justin added new possible targets to his freely-licensed fantasy portraits project for OSARE and OGA : $1500 by December 28th 30 portraits $2000 by December 28th 35 portraits $3000 by December 28th 35 portraits + a full length instructional video showing the painting process for the collection I sure hope we can arrange this gift of Justin's video to ourselves.. You can spread the word on fsdaily and reddit . In other news: there's a 48h game jam STARTING TODAY! Here 's the IRC channel, here are the rules. I recommend github and love2d !

I* joined PARPG to work on game interaction (controls and GUI). This decision was made after taking a look at some projects and talking with their members about what tasks are available. Now I want to tell you about the 'open source jobs' available out there. Radakan (RPG) is currently a solo project that uses the Python 3D engine Panda3D . Project lead Taldor would like help with the game design, GUI design, Writing (dialog & quests) and content creation (creating and converting models, managing the content pipeline). Warning: Radakan's website is currently down, best way to get in contact is irc.freenode.net#radakan . CubeCreate (FPS + Editor) will be a Lua-driven Sauerbraten-based engine. It could use some design help for editor accessibility improvements and thoughts on asset management (model/texture import) while the developers port to Lua. 0 AD (RTS) has a a well-compiled list of tasks. Megaglest (RTS) would like to have somebody find more players for the g...

Bitfighter There's a new version of the retro-style multiplayer top-down action game Bitfighter and a well-readable changelog: This version features new Soccer rules, and a verified user name system protected by your forums password. Many other improvements, including important stability fixes and enhancements for all platforms. love2d 0.7 no-game-screen LÖVE 0.7 "Game Slave" has finally been released! This is a Lua 2D game engine also known as "love2d". Oh, and it's on Indie DB. Oh, and Indie DB allows to sort engines by license ! Framebuffers, for rendering to places other than the screen. Threads, for true multithreaded programming. New callbacks, like love.quit and love.focus. A text-origin change from lower- to upper-left. And about a million different bugs have been squashed! You'll find games and toys and demos to try out in this forum and you can give my stupid little game a try too. "The Guardians of Windmills" OpenClonk sc...

The style Open-art artist Justin Nichol intends to create 30 freely licensed portraits (or more) in the style you see above. I support his Fantasy Portrait Marathon for 3 purposes: Allow an open source enthusiast artist to continue his studies Provide portraits for  the excellent slash-and-hack OSARE Add a quality set of art to OpenGameArt for use in various games The cash $1500 , Dec 28 The target Targeted is a backing of $1500 until end of 2010. At time of posting, $580 (38.6%) have been already pledged (7 backers ). The artist Other works by Justin Justin Nichol is attending the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, Ca. He contributed art to PARPG and OGA . He has a portfolio . The portraits GIMP will be used for drawing the portraits Backers will be able to determine the faces they pay for (check the right sidebar of the project page for details) The portraits will be CC-BY-SA/GPL dual-licensed for maximum copyleft compatibility I can only say: invest in this one! And spread t...