Posts

Showing posts from June, 2013

Data Dealer, an interesting project to fund!

The the last Kickstarter game project we featured was sadly not successful and with only 11 days to go it doesn't look too good for Data Dealer either. But this HTML5 and CC-by-SA licensed game project comes with a pretty cool idea and is quite playable already. It centers around the idea that services like Facebook & Google really arn't in the business of bringing you a good service (aka "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold") and makes a ironic game out of that. Here is game-play trailer to give you an better idea: Or try the current demo on their webpage . Now of course as we have all recently learned (or at least got confirmation about), the reality is even more twisted than just the private business side of things. But over the revelations of the mass surveillance by the NSA & Co., we should still not forget that all those big internet companies arn't victims by far either. P.S.: My best wishes

Unvanquished summer tournament

Image
Given the often quite small online communities around FOSS games, one has to become creative on how to keep players and attract new ones. Regular tournaments are one of those good ideas, albeit one that is a lot of work organizing. One of the games that is still struggling to attract a stable player base is Unvanquished , even though the game is based on Tremulous and thus quite well developed game-play wise. Don't hide from the Aliens However for those complaining about it being the "same old" just with fancy graphics, they have implemented an all new resource and base building system, which will be also used in the tournament! To quote them: Your tactics may need to change to compensate for this, but you can always test out the new gameplay on our development server beforehand, as well as by attending and observing our weekly development games on Saturdays. An explanation of the differences between our gameplay and the classic Tremulous variety will be explained in

DevCorner: Underapprechiated game engines

In my never ending search for a FOSS game engine that is usable for game modding with out having to reinvent the wheel (nor requiring to be a C++ code master) & having decent tools for content creation (because I am spoiled and think that is a minimum requirement for a game engine) I have become quite disillusioned lately. That is because *spoiler alert* sadly there is none so far... but a few are close luckily. The usual contenders for 3D action games are your mixed assortment of idTech based engines, most notably ioQuake3 . There are a few upcoming contenders like Unvanquished's Daemon engine (which is a mix of ET:Wolf, ioQuake3 and Xreal) and a yet to emerge idTech4 based champion (my uninformed guess is that it will be dhewm3 ). But all of them lack a decent game-play scripting function. On the other side of the idTech spectrum, there is the idTech1 based granddaddy DarkPlaces , which while having advanced to an quite impressive feature set, suffers a quite a bit from its

Lost Sky Tactical J-RPG [PyGame]

Image
Lost Sky is a PyGame-based Tactical J-RPG that runs on Linux, OS X and Windows. To play on a system that has mercurial and pygame installed, run: hg clone https://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public cd lost-sky-project-public/Story\ of\ a\ Lost\ Sky/ chmod +x srpg.py ./srpg.py Lost Sky screenshots Video: Lost Sky Gameplay: Tactical jRPG on Linux [PyGame]  Story of a Lost Sky is a Turn Based Strategy RPG with gameplay that is similar to Fire Emblem. Units are placed on a tile map and each side takes turns moving and attacking. Outside the battle map, the player is able to customize their characters and equip new spells and traits. This project was discovered by seeing a link banner on  Valyria Tear 's blog. Yay networking! Code License: New BSD Content License:  Various: PD, CC-BY 3.0, CC-Sampling+ (non-free), Unknown

Xonotic 0.7 released

Image
After an agonizingly long wait, I am happy to report that a new official release of the premier FOSS arena FPS Xonotic is available to the masses. Here is a nice (but slightly older) game-play video for those not having played Xonotic yet: Changes are quite extensive compared to the last official release... most notably an extensive update the the CTF mode , some neat additional features for competitive gaming and an assortment of great new maps. New maps in Xonotic 0.7 On the technical side of things, the engine DarkPlaces got quite a few performance improvements (mainly due to the fact that the creator now works at Valve software and thus has direct access to Nvidia's and AMD's graphics hardware divisions) and that an all new script compiler is now in use. That it runs on SDL 2.0 might also increase it's usability a lot for some. There are also finally an animation bending feature for the player-models and creation of new characters has never been easier now that the i

DevCorner: Liberate some great Blender game art!

Image
UPDATE: First set of files has been released (license CC0) and on my advise he added some stretch goals: 600$ > 3 game ready Enemies! (models, sfx, animations, effects) 650$ > Dynamic optimized lighting system! (rich dynamic lighting with low resource usage ) 750$ > 4 new weapons!(model, texture, sound) 850$ > Triple the amount of the actual props! (interactive objects,explosibles, new walls, doors windows etc.) 900$ > New player model (model, textures) Currently it is standing at 530$ and there are 22 days to go, so chances are we will see some more nice stuff out of this. ------------ Way too many closed-source game projects never see the light of the day, and their code and assets are forever lost. Now at least one developer thought he could at least make a few bucks by liberating this content under the CC0 license: There is some seriously nice stuff in that pack, and the 500 US $ he is asking for on his indigogo page is a bargain for it. At the time of writing thi

Hedgewars 0.9.19 released

Image
Everyone's favorite clone of worm-warfare , Hedgewars recently got a rather big new release as one of the developers pointed out to us by email. One of the new level themes for Hedgewars 0.9.19 The changes are quite extensive, so instead of failing to summarize them here, check out the above linked quite extensive original release announcement. You can also have a look at this fan-made trailer if you enjoy cheezy stuff ;)