Gaming Daily A-Z

One of our affiliate websites OpenGameArt (OGA), a free repository for public domain and copyleft licensed art, has just begun hosting this year's Summer Game Jam. To all libre developers looking for a challenge, this is your call to arms. The rules are simple: participants are to create a game which independently of length and genre must use 6 art assets already available at OGA. The type of engine or code license used is up to the creator, but any artwork from the repository employed, along with any derivates, must comply with the specific licensing of each. While this does not mean any game submitted to the jam will be libre, there's a good chance some will be, so regardless of whether you are a game developer or not, it would be wise to keep an eye on the contest results. It is also worth applauding OGA's initiative as a way of fostering usage and creation of Creative Commons licensed assets, and to spread word of the cultural benefits of open development. Further info...

We talked about it before here , but now there is only about 2 days left and even though all funds go to the team regardless of if the goal is reached, they are still a long way off what then would need to create a nice set of openly licensed fantasy monsters. So please head over to their indiegogo fund-raiser page: "Free the Monsters" and donate.

*hrmmpf* New FreeOrion 0.43 release . Unvanquished Alpha 18 . Some news from the standalone idTech4 Hexen remake . Open-source reimplementation of Caesar3 engine picked up again. OpenMW 0.25.0 released. New Ya3dag 1.42 release. Files of the Open(GameArt)Bundle released under CC0. tl;dr: Just click on the links above :p

Hey folks! Just a quick note.  I'm looking to fund work on OpenGameArt.org full time (probably via Kickstarter or similar) once my current work project is done, and I'm interested in hearing what people would like me to work on.  If you have any thoughts, please join the discussion on OGA: http://opengameart.org/content/if-i-could-work-on-oga-full-time-what-would-people-want-me-to-code-or-do ...or on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1d11ir/i_run_opengameartorg_and_im_looking_at_options_to/ Thanks! Bart

The Content Creation Phase of the Liberated Pixel Cup is over! You might want to ignore this blog post and read their  announcement  instead. Here is a partial preview of the results: More, not so nice previews: [ part1 , part2 ] 18 minute preview of all .flac files (two .ogg files excluded): Download from box.net [ mp3 , 17M or ogg , 13M] Get all files from  opengameart.org/lpc-art-entries  in .zip format: Download from mediafire.com [ link , 185M], box.net [ part1 , 96M |  part2 , 90M] Now it is time for the Coding Phase of the Liberated Pixel Cup! Rules : Start: July 1st, 12:01 AM Pacific Daylight Time End: July 31st, 11:59PM Pacific Daylight Time License:  Code entries must be free and open source, and must be available under the GNU GPL 3.0.  You may optionally release the code under any additional license(s) that you choose. Source code:  You must provide the complete source code for your entry.  Any code you have writte...

This weekend the Liberated Pixel Cup started its art contest, which will run until the 30th of June. You can check out the style guide and the existing assets here (includes a interactive HTML5 demo) . Reasonable prizes for the winners and runner-ups might motivate you to contribute, but judging will be only after the second phase of game prototyping, which ends on July 31st. But even if you don't win, you can be sure that your contributions will be a very valuable part of the resulting FOSS game content pack, so every small addition counts. Good luck!

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 !

Today is another session of: "Look what I found in my FG spam folder" ;) But this time I am actually adding a lot of nice other stuff to it, so that it is almost a "dev-corner" post! But first things first... the frogatto developers made us aware that there is a new game based on their really nice 2D engine, called Cube Trains : Cube Trains Beta gameplay Note that, just like frogatto, the final version will cost a few pennies, but the engine is totally FOSS and the current Beta is still free to download. This seems to fit to the general idea of the folks behind this engine as they outlined in the email to us: I'm really glad we now have a second major title done in frogatto's engine, because we're gradually trying to position frogatto's engine as an open-source alternative to closed-source packages like GameMaker or RPGMaker;  partly just because development tools are one software category that benefits far more than other categories from being ...

OpenGameArt's texture section just received an update. There now is a category tree and files from texture packs are also available as single nodes (pages/description/downloads). You can see some discussion about the new features on the official announcement 's comments.

I'm excited to announce that OpenGameArt.org is will be teaming up this summer with the Free Software Foundation and the Creative Commons for a big summer games contest, the Liberated Pixel Cup ! The TL;DR version is that the Liberated Pixel Cup will take place in two phases.  The first phase will be the art phase, in which artists will be asked to submit pixel art that matches an existing body of professional quality art that we're building specifically for the contest.  The second phase will be the programming phase, the object of which will be to create a game using the pre-made assets along with the assets created by contestants during the art phase.  A longer overview (as well as the official rules page) can be found on the website . I've been running OpenGameArt.org for just over three years now, and I'm incredibly excited because this marks the first official recognition we've received from the FSF and the CC.  It's particularly awesome because it'...

Today I'd like to talk about how free culture can be (perhaps counter-intuitively) good for the commercial games business.  I'm using Dungeons & Dragons (and its recent and highly successful fork, Pathfinder ) as a concrete example of what I'm talking about, but there's no reason this couldn't also apply to computer games as well. I've been a Dungeons & Dragons geek for 20 years now, pretty much since I was introduced to it my freshman year of high school.  Back in my high school days, D&D was in its second edition and the internet was in its infancy.  Dungeons and Dragons was owned by a litigious beast of a company called TSR, which was well known for sending nastygrams every time someone put up a web page with any fan-created D&D content.  This was particularly ironic, since the whole idea behind Dungeons & Dragons was that they threw some rule books at you and then told you to create your own content with them. In the late 1990s, for a var...

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.

First 'mobile devices' contest  submission  by Mumu The current OpenGameArt challenge is ' mobile devices ' and ends on Monday, December 5, 2011. The contest before that was low on participants and  a survey was started  to figure out how to get more people involved. Becoming a WTactics character Taken from OGA:  WTactics  is currently offering  a chance to have your likeness on a WTactics card  in order to raise funds for the continued development of thier project.  From their website: Give our artists a picture of you or your beloved one and become a part of the game! The artist will create a nice portrait with your chosen class, clothing and equipment, making it an everlasting part of our game and the open source communities, turning it into an immortal memory. This reminds me of the  Fantasy Portrait Kickstarter project , which produced some pretty portraits but unfortunately still istn't finished yet. pzi's album cover Pal...

This is old news: OpenGameArt 2 launched and with it an improved interface for browsing and submitting freely licensed game art. Testing, feedback and submissions welcome of course. :) OpenGameArt 2 submission form FreeSound is also moving forward, away from FTP-submissions, away from CC-Sampling+, although it seems that noncommercial licenses will be supported. A beta of the new site is open for public testing! FreeSound 2 submission form - the upload button is flash... A very curious feature is the "bulk license change", which is what you see first when logging into FreeSound 2: FreeSound Bulk License Change If you're a FreeSound contributor, please log into the new site and select CC0 or CC-BY. I finally got hold of a video of OpenGameArt's admin BartK talking about his site at Libre Graphics Meeting May 2011: Video: OpenGameArt's founder about the site Does any of these submission forms scare you away? Did you notice an obvious interface design mistake? Got...

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 .

Time to swap... passwords Oh my. Two weeks ago Librivox . Now Blendswap. Read the story here . See their twitter for live updates. Remember to use strong !P4$$w0rd5%_. Hm, OpenGameArt appears to be down , so it can't be hacked right now at least. :)

The public domain audibook project LibriVox got hacked (not the first time it seems ). There was no open announcement yet [edit: here's the blog post ] but as a forum user I received an email: A hacker broke into the LibriVox forum and got access to our complete database including emails and encrypted passwords. We have locked them out of the system, and we’ve fixed the vandalism, but they still have our database. In the interests of full disclosure, here is some extra information: (1) The database contained every piece of communications sent through the forum, including all private messages. This information is now in the possession of the hacker. (2) All forum passwords in the database are encrypted. However, if your password was very simple, it will be trivial for the hacker to break the encryption using "brute-force" techniques. They will likely attempt exactly this, so if you use the same password on any other Internet service, you should immediately change your pas...

New Pages of Adventure graphics. OpenGameArt is looking for a hosting sponsor. The target is a dedicated server with following min. specs: Quad core, 64 bit CPU 4GB RAM 500GB hard drive space 1TB monthly transfer 1 gigabit connection 64-bit CentOS, RedHat or Fedora Root access and Autonomy