Gaming Daily A-Z

PyWeek #16 in April PyWeek logo PyWeek is a game jam that obviously goes on for one week and requires the use of Python. It takes place online and there are overall winners in team and solo categories, as well as awards. The dates of the 16th PyWeek challenge are 00:00 UTC April 14, 2013 to 00:00 UTC April 21, 2013. Registration opens on 15. March 2013. There is a message board for the community and there are interesting methods to publish Python games as HTML/JavaScript using pyjs , as demonstrated by the PyWeek #15 entry  Kaos . License Requirements : At least Shared Source required . Free software licenses recommended. PyWeek #15 Entry: Rainbow Rooms Rainbow Rooms Video Rainbow Rooms is a physical-nonsense-maze puzzle game based on libtcod . Various fonts are being used, some of which might be problematic license-wise for including in for example Debian's official repositories but it should be possible to replace them in less than two hours including research and documen...

This is a guest post by Hythlodaeus on an interesting FLOSS game engine project, being developed by a professional games company. ASYLUM video I guess I should take a few paragraphs on this article to explain my stance on crowd-funded game projects. I've always been turned off by most Kickstarter game projects for a very simple reason: after personally inquiring a plethora of developers on their stance for Open-Source and Free Software, I was generally met with negative replies, half-baked excuses, bitter retorts or complete silence. Now, although I recognize it is every developer's right to pick the license and the conditions for the usage of their own work, it strikes me as a very odd attitude for people engaging into crowd funding projects to be so unwilling to provide any other warranties to their prospective backers and future customers other than “we will make this happen if you give us enough money”. From this point, let's make something clear: pledging on a crowd-f...

Physica screenshots Let's play Physica - a hard casual platformer game played on Linux Physica is a very simple casual platformer game where the goal is to drive a square through game levels from its starting position to his goal, avoiding hazards and without falling down. SkyRiot screens SkyRiot is available for free for Android on Google Play  and was released under open source and free content licenses on SourceForge.net [ forum post ]. SkyRiot is a 2D flying shooting platform action game for Android devices. Fly a hoverboard and use an assortment of weaponry as you, an anarchist, single-handedly wage war against a totalitarian regime. Full 360-degree aiming along with total freedom of movement will keep you glued to your device for many hours as you blast your way across over 10 game maps. OpenMW v0.21.0 Commentary OpenMW  0.21.0 has been released. Changelog: Various dialogue, trading, and disposition fixes and improvements Torch flickering improved to better match vanil...

SNiS Engineering screen Stephen Cameron, one of my personal heroes of game development ( Be The Wumpus ), made Word War Vi support color laser projectors using the openlase library [ blog post ]. Word War vi driving RGB color laser projector with openlaser Another project that our forum users were allowed to follow in this thread is Space Nerds in Space: So this game (when it becomes a game) is very much inspired by Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator See: artemis.eochu.com The idea is you have a game which is played much as the actors in the Star Trek TV series played their roles on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. There are a number of "stations": Navigation, Weapons, Science, Communications, etc. and each player assumes that role. Each station has it's own laptop or other computer which communicates via network to a central server which simulates the game universe. So it's kind of a cooperative multiplayer network game... No reason not to have multiple team...

While the recent new release of Cube2: Sauerbraten didn't bring any really big changes, the network of friendly forks keeps expanding. But before I go into more details, here is a new feature trailer of Cube2: Sauerbraten: The maybe most prominent and fully FOSS fork RedEclipse is still working on the promised new 1.4 release, with them doing some silly and some cool enhancement projects in the meantime... so yeah: Red Eclipse in Valve Time tm Octaforge still has a few day to go in order to avoid missing their estimated release "this month", but when browsing OpenGameArt.org, I came across an interesting fork of the Sandbox Game Maker fork, called Lamiae with the RPG game Kelgar : Kelgar Gameplay 0.8 - Indie DB According to their github page, content seems to be libre (CC-by or CC-by-SA) but information is a bit scarce. Even less information is available for this other fork, called SabiCube , but you can download and test their alpha. Oh and a bit older, but also ...

First, after 12 years of development, SuperTuxKart is a candidate for the March project of the month at Sourceforge. This is a huge honor and a significant boost for the project, so please vote for us here . Second, last month we were featured in Microsoft's IllumiRoom demo alongside Red Eclipse (another FOSS game) and Halo. For those who are interested, you can find the video in the last post. It's the second time STK has been featured in an unexpected place. The game has previously appeared in an episode of the show Friday Night Lights. The episode was critical of drug use and videogames, so downloads for the game probably didn't go up. I am not entirely sure why they chose a kart racer game over, let's say, postal 3, but licensing issues are likely to have played a prominent role in their decision. STK's permissive licenses mean, companies don't need to contact us before using it in media. Development news To try these new features out by compiling the lates...

I totally missed the rather big update of Unknown Horizons at the end of last month. The changes/updates are summarized by them as following : Completely new tileset New buildings: alvearies, barracks, blender, cocoa field, doctor, herbary, lookout, pastry shop, spice field, vineyard, vintner Many new graphics for existing buildings AI can now handle war and diplomacy Vast performance improvements New music track: Battle Tons of bug fixes Updated translations Much, much more Yesterday there was also a new 0.7.0 release of the 3D Worldforge client Ember: Worldforge 3D client Ember 0.7.0 Graphics are starting to look rather nice, right? Last but not least,the recently open-sourced AgentKeeper got a dedicated sub-forum on our messageboards and is looking for contributors: So, if you want to help out with this brand new jMonkey powered dungeon tycoon game, check out this nice list of video tutorials .

First off as a rather fast follow up on the last post: New version of Alien Arena out , boasting a 300% increase in render speed Small, bugfix release of War§ow out now Otherwise, as previously mentioned, Garage Games has now also released their 2D game framework under the MIT license: Their 3D game engine also saw some nice updates lately, however sadly their crowd funding push to port Torque3D to Linux fell (not totally unsurprisingly) short of their 30,000$ mark (with about 10,000$ pledged).

I will keep it short today: Unvanquished Alpha12 released : New rim-lighting options on alien scum New releases of Red Eclipse and Alien Arena still pending, but really close (tm), not much news from War§ow either except that they are looking for a .deb package manager . Xonotic's development seems to have slowed down a bit, but here is a nice road map of what is to come, and some current fragging fun can be seen here . Oh and the developers of the Octaforge engine estimated that the first release might be this month :)