Gaming Daily A-Z

During my tenure thus far as the head of OpenGameArt.org , I've run into a lot of different requests for art by various projects. I'd like to start out by saying this: Please, if you need art for your FOSS project, don't hesitate to come ask us! That's why we're here. :) That being said, there are ways to ask for art, and ways not to. Unlike some places, we'll never yell at you for not asking correctly, but there are still some things you can do (and avoid doing) to make your request more likely to be filled. I'd like to go over these today. Be specific about what you want. By far the biggest challenge in making art for FOSS games is that projects will have artists come and go, and because of that it's difficult to maintain consistency between pieces of art. It's possible to have a bunch of art elements that are all individually excellent but have a game that looks horrible because the art elements don't go together well. The first thing you

It's been a while since I last stirred up controversy on the freegamer blog, so I thought today I'd talk about -- gasp -- developing FOSS games commercially . There's a common misconception out there (although I'm guessing a majority of the readers of this blog are aware of it) that software can't be both libre and commercial (I use libre here instead of free to make it clear that I'm referring to free as in speech and not as in beer). This is a problem that the FOSS community has struggled with since the very beginning. Writing FOSS full time is difficult because, let's face it, your internet connection costs money (not to mention other minor things like food and rent). As such, a lot of FOSS development, particularly game development, is done as a hobby. The Open Source development model is somewhat difficult for a small developer (such as an indie game studio) to make money at. The current practice is to make the game code open and keep the game con

Yes... slow days here on FreeGamer... so we will try to give you a bunch of smaller news and projects to check out: First another Minecraft clone (this time for the PSP, but with GPL code): Lamecaft (which is a title I approve... generally ;) ). Then we have a open-source reimplementation of the famous jump&run Cave-Story: NXEngine . Maybe it is something nice to make your own platformer with too? A bit more high profile I guess is this game I recently cam across: Turtle Arena , which you might have guessed is another game based on the ioQuake3 engine. Its goals are pretty ambitious (it wants to be "not annoying"...but with those hideous turtles that might be next to impossible :p ). Artwork is CC-by-SA too, but obviously a bit IP tainted. Turtle Arena Another offspring of the ioQuake3 project are the ioWolf (RTCW and ET) engine upgrades, which seemed rather dead all the time. However some people actually forked them and are working on their own versions, of which esp

Lips of Suna - 0.4.0 Lots of sound effects. Master server and server browser. Climbing over obstacles. Merchants and trading. Attacks can be charged by holding the attack button. Projectiles and sword swings have speed lines. Controls can be customized in-game. Basic blood effects and beheading. More flexible map generation algorithm. Improved aer female, android female and kraken models. New items: crossbow, musket, revolver, barrel, bookcase, dewspring leaf, fruit. New spells: berserk, dig, firewall, light, travel. New quests: Brigands, Mining Guild, Sword on the Stone. Search and Rescue II - 2.3.0 Copyrighted Guadarrama scenery textures replaced with public domain ones in order to avoid licensing problems Small bugixes OpenSuse packages have been updated as well Hero of Allacrost - June 2011 Unstable Release Two brand new maps with many scripted events that develop the beginning plot of the main story Enter/exit sequences in battle to smooth the transition from map exploration to

Minetest-c55 Minetest-c55 : it's kind of like m*nec*aft, but: C++ & Irrlicht technically simple, stable and portable lightweight enough for a laptop with Intel 945GM graphics GPL

TeamTeapotCraft Ardorcraft is now an API for Ardor3D . Fortunately, they follow the philosophy of having biiig screenshots on the project's main page. Unfortunately, as a non-Java-savy person I don't know how to quickly test it. Fortunately, a video of its impressive AI/NPCs is available: ArdorCraft - First NPC tests

My greatest desire worst nightmare* is being answered realised! Long have I desired a graphical roguelike that was less savage than IVAN , and a nicer play than the standard 'land in random dungeon, and head off' fare that comes with the likes of Vulture's Eye and Lambda Rogue ( trailer ) - both good games but just missing something for me. * These things can swallow days and weeks of a man's life! The first thing to notice is that TOME4 is gorgeous . It has lavishly detailed sprites and stunning particle effects. Movement is smooth, and the UI is shaping up nicely. T.O.M.E. is not a new game series and is one of the better roguelikes. It looks like they are merging the depth of a traditional roguelike with the atmosphere of modern graphics in TE4/TOME4 and we are in for a treat if the latest betas are anything to go by. The last release, TOME4 1.0.0 beta28, was on the 4th of June. It is already a fairly polished experience, with a nice tutorial mode (Cha

Disclamer: Yes I am fully aware that the following two game do not have libre media, and that one of them will never have unless they get away from the copyrighted IP! That said... the following two gems are really nice examples of what can be done with FOSS engines if some skilled artists work with them.. and they are free as in beer too :p The first one has been mentioned before on FG, and is a Mod for the nice FOSS RTS Megaglest ( Did we mention that one had a small new release too? ). Annex: Conquer the World , doesn't seem to have it's one website yet (link goes to Moddb), but check out this awesome new video of that game (gives me a nice Starcraft vibe!): Annex gameplay teaser Actually I don't know anything about the media license on this one, and it isn't released yet, but the closed development process makes me doubt we will have much luck in regards to the media (source must be GPL just as Glest), but hey... you never know! The second one is as previously ment

Killer The Killer is a flash/as3-based nongame. Talking more about it might spoil it so if you're OK with that, there's a discussion going on at TigForums. The source is "what you want" and hosted on github . Perhaps this could be ported to Haxe/Fixel. The developer has an interesting " support me " implementation. Exclusive updates and postcards. :)

Strategic Initiative Strategic Initiative is "a semi real-time strategy game played over the Internet where the objective is to seize cities on islands". The technology used is Java. Have an alternative description: Strategic Initiative is an online multiplayer military strategy game played over 10 days where the objective is for you and your ally to control the most cities on the map. The code is available here under GPLv3.

Naev 0.5 A new release of the  2D space trading and combat game   Naev is out and available as binaries for Lin/Mac/Win  here . For those using Ubuntu (or other Debian-derived distributions), Naev is available from  PlayDeb . Naev is also available in  Arch Linux ,  Gentoo , and from the  openSUSE Games repository .  Have a changelog: List of changes since 0.4.2: For Players Larger universe Expanded Dvaered, Frontier, Empire and Pirate territories All-new Sirius and Soromid territory Big systems More planets per system Much larger planets, many new planet and station graphics Players must fly to jump points before jumping to another system Overlay map for in-system navigation Mouse interactivity Planet, ship and jump point targeting Contextual click actions (board, hail, land, etc.) Optional mouse-controlled flying Electronic warfare Ships have cloaking and detection abilities Sensor range depends on cloak vs detection Turrets no longer track all ships equally Time model changes In-ga

Time to swap... passwords Oh my. Two weeks ago Librivox . Now Blendswap. Read the story here . See their twitter for live updates. Remember to use strong !P4$$w0rd5%_. Hm, OpenGameArt appears to be down , so it can't be hacked right now at least. :)

The popular open source game Battle for Wesnoth has been featured in the new free online book The Architecture of Open Source Applications . We believe that the beauty of the Battle for Wesnoth as a program is how it made coding accessible to a wide variety of individuals. To achieve this aim, the project often made compromises that do not look elegant whatsoever in the code. It should be noted that many of the project's more talented programmers frown upon WML for its inefficient syntax. Yet this compromise enabled one of the project's greatest successes. Today Wesnoth can boast of hundreds of user-made campaigns and eras, created mostly by users with little or no programming experience. Read the full section online for further insight into the design and design decisions of Battle for Wesnoth.

bfxr Sfxr is a simple retro sound machine. It has undergone some iterations and the latest software based on its principle is bfxr , which also has valuable management tools. Their feature list: 5 new waveforms : triangle, breaker, tan, whistle, and pink noise. 3 new filters : compression, harmonics, and bitcrusher. Ability to lock parameters during mutation/randomization. Expanded pitch-jumping abilities - good for arpeggiation effects. Visualisation Mixer Keeps your sounds and mixes in persistant lists. Can reverse synths Ability to link directly to sounds Needs flash. Might be a problem. Can anybody with free flash implementations run this?