Gaming Daily A-Z

Staying with the theme of the festive season, how can FreeGamer help you prevent that awkward silence when you sit down with your relatives and realize you have nothing really to talk about? Well, open-source board games to the rescue... and you can spice up that quality family time by introducing some FOSS concepts ;) A rather interesting concept is d0x3d! (a network security game) : It is actually intended to be a sort of teaching aid ( ideas how to use it in class here ), but it seems interesting enough to play with friends and relatives too. You can order a full version of the game or download the sources under the sadly more restrictive CC-by-NC-SA here . A similar concept of combining teaching with playing is the trading card game Phylo . Sadly it is even more restrictive in licensing (CC-BY-NC-ND), thus I am stretching it a bit to mention it here. Much more open (and mentioned a few times before on FG) is Wtactics : Wtactics card examples Not much updates for it lately, but I

Welcome back to FreeGamer, and I hope you all had some nice holidays and avoided that dreadful family time by doing some productive FOSS game development ;) So what happened over the holidays? Well contrary to my earlier announcements Cube2:Sauerbraten and AlienArena did not see a new release yet . However maybe they still manage it by the end of the year :) Torque2D MIT is also not yet on their GIT account, but they made a new 2.0 release of the 3D counterpart, and are looking for crowd funding for making a proper Linux port (including all the development tools). So... time to make use of the funds your grandma gave you for X-mas ;) Also related to one of my previous posts : the help request for OpenDungeons and SumWars , did result in some interesting discussions at the very least. Not much new development regarding OD directly, but a new DungeonKeeper alike project surfaced utilizing the really nice JMonkey3D engine and a University backed AI system . See some early screensh

How soon is the deadline on your FOSS game project? You're probably thinking that you don't have one.  And in the sense that a commercial developer would use the word deadline, you don't.  There's no date looming above you on your calendar, no boss asking for updates at your next staff meeting, no investor threatening to pull their funding for your project if you don't finish on time.  As a FOSS developer who is writing games as a hobby, you have the luxury of taking your time, right? Nope.  Rather, your "deadline" is like the bandwidth limit on one of those cheap "unlimited" web hosting services.  It's sooner than you think, but it's not set in stone, so it's easy to not think about it until you're already past it.  The deadline for your FOSS game project is when any of these things happens for the first time: You realize you've bitten off more than you can chew, and lose interest. Changes in your life (getting married, havin

Looks like we will get some nice x-mas presents this year: A bit delayed but probably right on time for the Mayan end of the world, we will see a long awaited new release of Cube2:Sauerbraten . Read about the release announcement here . Hmm, I wonder if it has already Occulus Rift support... Also on the FPS front, AlienArena is having a major engine update, with a claimed massive 3-4 times speed increase in BSP rendering and more VBO improvements. Mars meets CounterStrike? Furthermore they announce a new game-mode to be added soon, which tries to slow down the game-play of AlienArena a bit and add a more tactical appeal. Sounds a bit like selling out to the CounterStrike/ModernWarefare crowd to me, but lets see how it will play ;) Last but not least, GarageGames has announced that after the recent FOSS licensed release of their 3D engine Torque3D (see latest updates here , sadly no working Linux port yet), they will also open-source their 2D engine ! And in fact it will not only be a

Today I let the videos speak: First of all a nice FOSS bullet hell SHMUP, called Shmupacabra : Taisei Project is maybe also relevant if you like getting killed ALOT (hehe, insider joke for q). Previously mentioned Cube Trains (based on Frogatto ) has reached version 1.0: You can support the developer of this nice puzzle game by buying the Expansion-pack for 2 Canadian bucks or more! Another option to try and fund FOSS game development... maybe there will be some sales figures published at some point? Next on the list: open-source engine reimplementation project Corsix-th : You will need the original game for the non-free artworks though. And last but not least: 0 A.D. got a brand new website: www.play0ad.com ! Celebrating this they also made some nice video tutorials for total beginners: Have a look at tutorial 2 and tutorial 3 also. Signing off :) Edit: Small interview with the 0 A.D. developers.

Ancient Beast is a FOSS game project that has been in development by Freezing Moon for a couple of years, tantalizing everyone with top notch concept art and 3D models.  After a rather large restructuring in game scope, where they changed from attempting to create a 3D RTS in the Blender Game Engine, to a 2D hexagonal TBS built on HTML5, they have delivered a promising gameplay prototype that offers a mix of Heroes of Might and Magic and Magic: The Gathering's gameplay.  Gameplay currently revolves around summoning creatures and using their abilities to defeat other summoners Still in heavy development, the game still needs to implement the entirety of its sizable bestiary , as well as adding animated creatures by utilizing the models they have created. So, if you have any skills in web development, jump aboard and help them complete this awesome game!

Ok, we don't normally do these kind of recruitment posts (don't send us emails about that!), but for the following two FOSS game gems we will make an exception (and it is officially sanctioned by our boss Charlie ;) ). So which ones do I mean? Well these: Link to homepage ; example video Link to homepage ; example video In recent months both games have stalled in development and people are starting to become quite pessimistic about the future ( 1 , 2 ). Strangely enough (for typical FOSS projects) it is not the artists who lack (there is actually an active group of contributors for both games, who are eager to see their artwork in the game; examples: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , all CC-by-SA licensed) but a severe lack of programmers. An example of not yet implemented OD graphics So how can you help out and dig into the code, and why am I posting about both games the same time? Well both are actually build on a somewhat similar base, utilizing OGRE3D for graphics and CEGUI for the GU

I filled a recent craving for playing a sci-fi real time strategy game by re-discovering Bos Wars and playing every single player map. image: Bos' level of art, many screenshots indicate a much lower quality. The game runs on low-spec computers and can be quite fast-paced. I quite enjoyed playing it in a tower-defense/tower rush style. The last release of Bos Wars has been over two years ago, but development is not frozen, the last commit was on 2012-08-09. The three biggest issues I personally had are: Some maps are aesthetically displeasing. For a beginner, it's hard to decide what map to play. Many units and buildings don't have voices/sounds. The interface is confusing in regards to resource quantity. Visual style of old maps image: most likely the first map you play in Bos (because it's selected by default) To address issues 1 and 2, I hope that this blog post will help. The screenshots at the bottom show the game start screen at 1280x1024 for every of the "S