Gaming Daily A-Z

  Top ten RPGs - I made a video of this. People who love text so much they would marry it, will be delighted to see this concise side-product of that video. A list of sorts. With thoughts that came to me after the fact. Especially nagging thoughts. The bestness of films is determined by their profitability. Which one can claim allows concluding the quality of the product. Maybe the marketing is part of that product. Whatever the case, none of this is applicable to the underground niche pro-tip specialized target audience-seeking open source games, where using the word choice "open source" is valid enough to stop writing and discuss philosophy. Thereby I declare that " best " means " complete-ish, playable, fun " which is 33%-66% objective. I present to you - in order of " not like in the video " - the best eleven minus one* RPGs that ever existed yet. RPG platforming is still a concept to get used to but for some reason It works well. As for...

In a pretty surprising move the source-code of the idTech3 based games Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy were released under the GPL by Activision and Raven Software. You can find the original source drops here and here . The content is obviously still propitiatory (e.g. you need to buy it), but some people have already plans to upgrade the source as OpenJK (most likely back-ports from ioQuake3 ) and make a Linux version most likely. Would be also cool if a nice stand-alone FOSS 3rd person sword-fighting game would come out of this... but the detailed player animations will likely be the biggest road-block. Ahh well... and since I hate posting something with no pictures or videos I include the pretty nice new Flare 0.18 release: It includes some pretty nice new features too: 10 Equipment Slots, up from 4 (and easily configurable) Starting "Class" choice (beginner's power/item kit) Environmental/Ambient Sounds on maps Much improved handling of Animations, E...

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...

FLARE has an excellent new website and a series of contributor interviews: Community Spotlight: Justin Nichol Contributor Spotlight: Igor Paliychuk Community Spotlight: Brandon Morris Contributor Spotlight: Thane Brimhall The latest release is 0.16.

Knights , a top-down multiplayer quest/fighting game, received some GUI enhancements . Tales of Gydia , a Liberated Pixel Cup fantasy turn-based RPG that focuses on UGC , was started on SourceForge.net. Unknown Horizons , a historical city-building and economy RTS, received some new citizen building graphics from a first-time contributor. Black Dog , an extremely atmospheric HTML5, fully-FOSS helicopter mini-game, got its (unfinished) Android port released . Linus Torvalds not only showed his annoyance with Nvidia but also his love towards open source games in a recent talk (goto 58m20s). ctdabomb , an active community member, converted and license-clarified the Art Museum SuperTuxKart racing track over the time span of about one and a half months, after asking the community for support. SuperTux , a cute platformer, needs help finishing an animated owl sprite. To the left, you can see the current placeholder graphics. FLARE , a hack'n'slash RPG engine and game, requested...

Today I got a small rant: So there are a few really prominent types of games which ought to have their FOSS representatives, right? Ok, well a few like epic story driven single-player games will probably never show up due to inherent problems to develop such games through the FOSS method, but besides that lets have a look what we got: Good and playable FOSS multi-player FPS games under active development?  Check! ( Xonotic , RedEclipse and several other with un-free media) Good and playable FOSS RTS games under active development? Check! ( 0 A.D. , MegaGlest , Warzone2100 , Spring mods etc.) Good and playable FOSS racing games under active development? Hmm... not an expert, but I guess Speed Dreams and Stunt Rally apply. Flight simulators, turn based strategy? Check: Flightgear ! Check: Battle for Wesnoth ! Action RPGs like Diablo or Torchlight? Hmmm??? Ok... sure you will find some other genres (Mechsims, realistic tactical FPS etc.) which also lack a much played/far into deve...

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 ...

Hale RPG A very fine read is this review of the TBS/RPG Hale. Its first comment was written by the sole developer. Video: Flare 0.15 Flare 0.15 introduces outdoor areas. Translation submissions are welcome now as well. Look for instructions and examples in this post . Freedroid RPG  recently released the second candidate for 0.15. Soon it will be ten years since registration of the freedroid project on SourceFroge.net. Checking on Scourge 2 , another open source RPG title, there has been no development for eight months.

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 .

SDL -makers Galaxy Gameworks are looking for a talented developer who would be interested in developing and maintaining SDL . Pfunked might support artists starting their own funding campaigns for creating art for FLARE , as he did with Justin's . Here are some asset ideas. Then there's the option to offer high-quality art for being 'funded into free' at OpenGameArt. The current target is $130 for this dwarf warrior . I wish there were (more) open source projects at 8bitfunding , Kickstarter , Fundry  and IndieGoGo . The only open source game dev projects I found are a flash game  (successful), FAR Colony and an interactive fiction engine iphone port  (successful). I'm sure not only full game projects could make use of these fundraising services but free content creators as well. Slick contest - art by danc Then there's a game competition by the Slick java game engine. Check the image above for rules and prizes. That's about all I can find and think of ...

Flare v0.11 gameplay (spoiler warning) v0.11 of FLARE got released and developer Clint Bellanger writes in the FLARE blog about how it is tempting to add features (like adding more skills or replacing old ones) instead of moving to the next target (in this case vendors and action bar customization). Luckily what leads to a complete game wins in this case. :) Note: polish != re-inventing/re-creating. FOSS games are vulnerable to feature-creep and in many cases just don’t feel “finished” because they never really are. [...] It may be more fun to add new features than it is to polish those you already have, but polish is far more important if you want your game to be any good. - William In his 4 problems with FOSS games the author identifies following weaknesses of FOSS: Technical problems Lack of originality Lack of personality Design by committee By the way: if you haven't read the challenges of developing long, plot-heavy FOSS games by OpenGameArt-admin Bart K yet.. you s...

FLARE logo OSARE is now FLARE . From an OGA tread: I sent an email to Richard Stallman asking if he's interested in supporting Justin Nichol's Creative Commons Fantasy Portrait Project . He pointed out that the difference between "open source" and "free" or "free/libre" and noted this: "However, if you decide to describe it "free" or "free/libre" instead of "open source", then I would be honored to participate." Stallman's lectures are what convinced me in the first place to use the GPL for my work, and to be interested in copyleft licenses in general. I'm quite honored that he answered my email at all, and I agree with his reasoning. IOSKETCH visual programming IOSKETCH is a cross-platform visual authoring tool for games. It is written in Common Lisp. Summoning Wars 0.5.3 The new version SumWars 0.5.3 is out: Upgrade to Ogre 1.7 and CEGUI 0.7 More art and story content Russian translation See the...