Gaming Daily A-Z

Back from holidays... and no new post on the blog in the mean time??? qudobup is getting lazy :p So before we lose all our loyal readers (e.g. the blog authors themselves *chirp* *chirp*), here a quick update: Zero-K , the Spring-Engine using RTS game, got a bunch uf new releases lately... all the way up to version 0.8.13.1 by the time of writing this. Try it out if you liked Total Annihilation back in the days :D However, the main reason for me writing about this is the cool multi-touch (tablet) interface someone coded for the spring engine and showcased with Zero-K: Zero-K multitouch Still a bit rough around the edges as you can see... but this shows that RTS games might have a bright future on tablet-pcs!

Found this nice abstract shooter over at LGDB a few days ago: Garden of coloured lights gameplay As you can see, a nice piece of bullet-hell... just the music isn't as catchy as the one from Aleste (*sneeks in old-school gaming reference*). In totally unrelated news, the guys (and gals?) from the open-source MMORPG Planeshift have started a small PR project called " Free Game Alliance " to promote theirs and other high profile open-source games. You can read some comments from our forums about it here ... but all the nagging aside, I sure hope something good comes out of this! Oh and Planeshift itself seems to be coming along quite nicely also... hadn't checked their progress in ages... Another project whose developers show some serious long term commitment, is AlienArena , which just got a major update to version 7.52 and is now also easily available via the Desura Linux beta ;) Check out the change-log here .

No screenshot of Pingus 0.7.4 Version 0.7.4 of Pingus  introduces an array of changes: Content: New levelsets, "Desert" and "Factory Campaign" (27 new levels in total) This is the first use of the desert and factory graphics in official levels Gameplay: Deadly fall height increased Digger/Miner/Basher paths cleanup Features: Demo recordings/playback re-implemented (32bit/64bit not compatible) --usedir parameter added (useful for portable play) Unicode support added Option menu added Usability: Window can be resized in-game Soundcard dependancy removed Man page  added Look: Level dimensions now suit 1920x1200 resolution Anti-aliasing added to bitmap fonts Performance: Software rendering improved OpenGL rendering option added Other: Editor enhancements Fixes Good Old Colorful M.A.R.S. (0.7.4) 0.7.3 and then 0.7.4 of M.A.R.S. were relesed: New speacial New weapon Dutch, Mongolian and Norwegian languages added In-game speed settings

So a while ago we were asked on our forums why we never featured any games done with the open-source Visual Novel engine Ren'Py ... which I pretty much dismissed in my mind with "prfff... those are not games anyways" :D But well... a small competition over at the very nice Linux Gaming News blog asking which game engine actually had the most Linux compatible (and often at least freeware) games released so far, got me thinking about this again as with literally hundreds of games available on-line , we shouldn't simply dismiss this genre outright, I guess. Screen-shot from the Ren'Py game Katawa Shoujo Luckily, I do watch Anime from time to time, so I wasn't completely "out of the loop" so to say and thought "if tentacle p*** didn't kill me, I am up for anything" (except for 4chan's /b/ :D ). And at least in Japan, Visual Novels are a pretty big thing, with "next-gen" console releases, high quality movie adaptions and mil...

GunFu Deadlands title screen GunFu Deadlands , a quick, atmospheric retro keys+mouse top-down shooter for Win/Osx/Lin has been updated ( 1.01 ) to run with LÖVE 0.7.2 and the development codebase moved from Subversion to  Git . The game plays perfectly fine on a ASUS EeePC 1000H netbook running Arch Linux 32bit. A previous version (don't remember which) was extremely slowly. I can't tell whether the playable speed is thanks to improvements of GFD, love2d or perhaps the drivers for my netbook but if you've had performance trouble with the game in the past, try again! Note: if you get shot in the title screen and start the game before respawning, you will be able to walk through walls. This is the first update of GunFu Deadlands since the 1.0 release 22 months ago. Video: GunFu Deadlands 1.01 gameplay By the way, did you know that GunFu Deadlands is one of the  250 Indie Games You Must Play ? PS: I got word from the developer about the performance increase: Just for your in...

"Summer?" you ask? Well.. I'ts warm in Berlin.* Also a warning: this article is 80% development, 31.5% art and 18% games. Cross-language forums so far FreeGameDev Forums  now have Spanish and Swedish/Danish/Norwegian subforums. Should we add some more? Read  this  then write  here . OpenClonk old and new terrain rendering The 2.0 OpenClonk release brings higher resolution for the terrain, which makes the game look a lot better. Read the full changelog here . Blendswap entries.  Amazing . Check out the Blendswap   Military Vehicles Contest  entries: I'm amazed. But that's just me. I have a thing for mechs.  Alot  even. WebGL lessons. Freely licensed too. Did anybody know of these CC-BY-SA-licensed WebGL tutorials ? This dog  told me about them. "Hacking" 8-hour prototypes: Hubwar and Nodehack * Speaking of Berlin, Germany. There was a little game dev jam in Berlin . Two of the prototypes are open source! ( Hubwar and Nodehac...