Gaming Daily A-Z

Let's Play  (LP) is an uprising form of previewing and experiencing video games. While a review summarizes the experience, a LP allows to look a player over their shoulder and indirectly experience the game from one perspective in its entirety - if both Let's Player and viewer have the endurance. LPs have many styles: non-commented, informational, humorous... And their production quality varies too, be it video, audio or presentation. Example of a Let's Play video in its natural environment Some creators of LPs ("LPers") earn money using YouTube's monetization features. When they do, YouTube's semi-automatic moderation process starts paying more attention to the videos' compliance with copyright. Sometimes, LPers will contact game developers to receive permission to create LPs. To many creators of games, LPs are a welcome form of promotion and they will always say yes. Clint Bellanger of FLARE released a Let's Play policy , which elegantly covers b...

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...

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...

Two games recently started "Kickstarter"-style campaigns on IndieGoGo with part of the offer being "becoming open source": Monster 2 , a JRPG which has been open source for a while but then was closed during a upgrade of game data/content, will be released under the  Give it Your Own License, License  if it reaches its goal of USD 1500,-. Tumblegonk , a yet unreleased simple puzzle game, will be released under GPL if it reaches its goal of USD 850,-. Is this how open source games should receive at least a bit of funding? I wouldn't mind if some old commercial or freeware titles would do such a step (which can't really be repeated for the same project/game). It's not a sustainable principle of course though. There are few alternatives of making money with open source game development that comes to mind: Make the engine open source and the game data freeware but sell it on closed platforms, like Frogatto ( iOS version is for-pay). Port existing open sour...

While we are talking about crowd-funded game-dev assets: The Liberated Pixel Cup has almost reached its funding goal, but today is the last day to contribute... so think about the poor captured pixels and donate !

~5% of David's Merceds' sounds will be donated to the public domain At the time of this post, USD 363 353 are missing and 8 days are left for TrackTimeAudio's Mercedes Sound Recording Kickstarter Project  to be crowdfunded. In a recent update , it was announced, that 5 to 10% of the more than 200 resulting sounds will become freely available. Free, open source projects that could profit from this include TORCS , Speed Dreams , Trigger Rally , Stunt Rally , Rigs of Rods and many more. It would be delightful to see if advocates of free content licensing would bring this project to a "funded" state and further with many small contributions. (And remember, this will allow you to comment what your incentive for supporting was :) ).

Donations: Commercial use of Free Software and Libre Art Kickstarter for Game Dev I'm sure you heard the amazing  Kickstarter news  ;) Dusted, author of Wizznic!  shared a short thought about the news I'm actually talking about. FOSS Games and Donations Now The FLARE RPG project page now has a PayPal donation button. 0A.D. uses  Pledgie  for funding. There is a list of FOSS projects that accept BitCoin  here  and a more general list  here . OGA and Kickstarter Thoughts OpenGameArt founder and admin Bart K, shared that he is considering Kickstarter, but could use some more inspiration about what rewards could be given to high pledge-givers. OGA/CC/FSF Game Dev Contest Plan There's also a game dev contest in the works, which will be organized this summer by Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation and OpenGameArt. The details are still getting ironed out. Donations on Free Gamer By the way: here on FreeGamer, we have Flattr ...

Justin Nichol finished the Kickstarter-crowd-funded portrait marathon! The art has been uploaded here to OpenGameArt. Back in December 2010, the project was funded with USD 2,567 (of at least USD 1,500) to make 30 portraits. Now all 30 portraits of the backers that sent him model photos have been finished. The remaining five backers have been asked to get in contact with the artist. Best via Kickstarter. Kickstarter will take a fee of USD 128.35 (5%). Justin has a blog  you can follow.

New fantasy portraits by Justin Nichol [ more here ] Remember Justin  Nichol 's crowd-sourced  fantasy portrait commission? In  a recent announcement  the artists reports, that the collection of 35 portraits will be finished by February 2012, as they will be exhibited some day that month somewhere in California, USA.

When I was looking for last post's link to Justin's portraits , I found a collection of b/w portraits and a new crowdfunding game project: Time Hammer. Timehammer project introduction video What is Time Hammer ? A game where you run, jump, fall and die, try again, smash enemies, and have fun (hopefully!)  It's a retro, 8-bit throwback to an earlier time, but with some modern touches that we just couldn't help but include.  Low gravity, destructible environments, a kickin chip-tune soundtrack... yeah, it's a blast! A gaming engine built from scratch in HTML5 / Javascript. Time Hammer will be the first fully-featured, plot-driven game featuring the HTML5 An indie community dream come true. The game engine will be released open-source on GitHub - meaning that anybody can download it, improve it, and use it for any purpose, free of charge. " Which license? " was my first thought and question. I haven't actually researched the nuance of those licenses, a...

The last version of Flare that Free Gamer took a look at was 0.11. The newest version is 0.14. Character customization in Flare Title and savegame loading screens now exist, adding to immersion. Character customization (gender, portrait and name) is now possible. (Note how much depth this part of starting a game can acchieve in some cases). The character portraits are a product of Justin Nichol's fantasy portrait marathon . Joystick support, conversations, vendors, quests, a new area and many more smaller additions included. It is now possible to configure keybindings and resolution, which leds to my first 720p HD video of Flare gameplay: Watch this video in 720p HD here Clint Bellanger, main developer of Flare, posted a  reflection  on game progress in Flare, which includes some simple but interesting statistics. You can show Flare some pocket love via Flattr .

Remember Justin Nichol's CC Portraits Marathon? There's an update [ kickstarter | justin's blog ]! I had an injury earlier in the year which kept me preoccupied, and then school started. The pace should be much quicker from this point on and I apologise for the delays. In any case, I have these 10 and about 23 others to complete (with 2 additional portraits of my choice to finish the 35 I guaranteed). I intend to complete the bulk over the next month and a half, and will try to post the fruits of my labor every Wednesday from this point forth, so if you don't see anything from me one wednesday, feel free to bug me.

Three more days, 688 more US Dollars pledged to the Portrait Marathon and we get art video tutorials (so spread a little word, why don'tcha? ;) ): Fantasy Portrait Marathon pledge progress OGA's presents There has been a *LOT* of giving on OGA lately, two fully rigged 3d character models for example. Another present: IOFORMS' (aka iosketch) first alpha release is being prepared. Please let us know in the comments if you notice are any special present-ish foss game releases. :)

The fantasy portrait marathon reached first base. I just wanted to let you know. Remember, that if it reaches $3000 ($9000!!!/3), we will get a massive instructional video!

Justin added new possible targets to his freely-licensed fantasy portraits project for OSARE and OGA : $1500 by December 28th 30 portraits $2000 by December 28th 35 portraits $3000 by December 28th 35 portraits + a full length instructional video showing the painting process for the collection I sure hope we can arrange this gift of Justin's video to ourselves.. You can spread the word on fsdaily and reddit . In other news: there's a 48h game jam STARTING TODAY! Here 's the IRC channel, here are the rules. I recommend github and love2d !

The style Open-art artist Justin Nichol intends to create 30 freely licensed portraits (or more) in the style you see above. I support his Fantasy Portrait Marathon for 3 purposes: Allow an open source enthusiast artist to continue his studies Provide portraits for  the excellent slash-and-hack OSARE Add a quality set of art to OpenGameArt for use in various games The cash $1500 , Dec 28 The target Targeted is a backing of $1500 until end of 2010. At time of posting, $580 (38.6%) have been already pledged (7 backers ). The artist Other works by Justin Justin Nichol is attending the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, Ca. He contributed art to PARPG and OGA . He has a portfolio . The portraits GIMP will be used for drawing the portraits Backers will be able to determine the faces they pay for (check the right sidebar of the project page for details) The portraits will be CC-BY-SA/GPL dual-licensed for maximum copyleft compatibility I can only say: invest in this one! And spread t...