Gaming Daily A-Z

Somehow I'm missed yesterday... shit happens! My favourite RPG project Scourge now comes with outdoor areas which look rather promising . The progress on this project has been relentless which I really enjoy seeing. All it needs is some modellers to start producing some nice character models and some better decorations and it will look beautiful. I think the somewhat light-hearted premise for the storyline might be putting off potential players though so it would also be nice to see somebody product a mod for this game with a more serious storyline. Scourge is designed to be moddable. Zaxxon Remake is a remake of the Sega game [surprisingly called] Zaxxon . The remake runs on both Linux and Windows but does not seem to be open source. I have contacted the author to encourage him otherwise. Anyway it's an isometric shoot-em-up, something not too well represented in the Free gaming world. I can think of a handful but they are all quite shallow games, perhaps Chromium B...

Want to simulate running your own college or university? You can . And it's open source. I post this purely out of amazement that somebody would program such a "game". Perhaps a more relevant simulation game is, er, running your own game design company. GameBiz: The Magical Years and GameBiz 2 ( download ) provide such an experience, but only freeware and on Windows. Again, posted purely out of intrigue. Back on to more, er, better-er things... version 0.3 of SuperTuxKart is imminent. :-) There has been a spike in activity of late as the developers try to push out the next version, which now uses SDL instead of PLIB . There is an RC available for download (released quietly earlier in May) if you want to help test things. The main weakness of the game is now the quality of the tracks. Hopefully a new release will attract a few people interested in creating some good new tracks for the game. They also need help creating a Windows build for the next release. Cut...

Haha, forgot to give the post a title so Blogger gave it this interesting one instead! Damnation of the Gods Damnation of the Gods is a project to make a game similar to Dungeon Master and the Eye of the Beholder series. For those not familiar with them, they are pseudo 3D RPGs - that is you have a first person view but you can only move on a grid (i.e. north, south, east, west) and the graphics are generally 2D sprites for both the environment and game characters. Unlike roguelikes the game is realtime so waiting around is not advisable. There's only a couple of screenshots but they show a fair amount of progress. You can play the latest version (0.17) on Linux or (via MingW) Windows. The author slightly confuses the term freeware with open source on the homepage but DotG is definitely open source. Eye of the Beholder II was one of my favourite games when I was growing up. It was challenging, immersive, and had excellent graphics for it's time. It was a tough game, ...

How wonderfully ironic that on the 1st anniversary of the inception of Free Gamer, I forgot to actually post. Lack of time and focus on work robbed me of the time required to bring you the usual high quality rambling. Another thing that seems forgotten is the Free Gamer Awards I so enthusiastically thought up a few weeks back. Fear not, as soon as I am done procrastinating planning them properly, it will all come together. Fortunately they are entitled the Free Gamer Awards 2007 which gives me another 6 months to execute them. *grin* As you may have noticed, I called this post, "A bit about me." I won't be talking about myself - sorry to disappoint you - just a bit about this blog. (Yes, a blog can have a sense of self, y'know.) I feel that one of the reasons FG has people reading it daily is because I stay fairly on-topic. I don't talk about much else other than Free Software games (ok, throw in a few freeware titles) and the aspects surrounding the devel...

Over on the Ubuntu forums, I came across a post looking for whelp with a new game - Project Kilo is an ambitious new project to create a commercial grade RPG. Arkhart Now, often I see people talk about how they want to create the next Oblivion and give up when they find out that just using just a paperclip and some bluetack only gets you a bluetacky paperclip and really creating something like an RPG take significant dedication, talent, and desire. As such, it is easy to poor water on these little fires by replying to such threads with a dose of reality - that commercial grade RPGs take a team of paid developers and artists years to create. And that previous efforts have just stagnated to the point of no hope (think Arkhart ). However I remember when Hero of Allacrost was just the dream of their lead developer Roots and he was canvasing for support and plugging away regardless of negative responses. Now look where they are - Allacrost is really shaping up nicely and turning into ...

Woah a nice new Free game! Irrlamb is described by it's developer(s) as "a 3D game that probably involves a lot of physics and frustrating gameplay." It looks really awesome. Check out the gameplay video . Think Marble Madness and add lots of fun extra ways to interact with objects using your spherical token. I especially liked the scene depicting the player sphere on top of a larger sphere and using cog-like mechanics to make it roll. Irrlamb looks fun and when I next get a free moment you can be sure I'll be trying it - it's available for Linux and Windows. Irrlamb just goes to show that with a bit of thought, you can take an old concept and put an original spin on it. Pun intended. ;-) I saw that one over on happypenguin.org and there's a few other game updates on the 'tome. I won't duplicate them here. One not there yet is the latest Stendhal release, version 0.60 of this console-style MMORPG. Language is a funny thing, console meaning ...

There's a new Ultimate Stunts release, 0.7.1, which adds a few nifty features and fixes a few commonly reported bugs. This open ended driving game continues it's history of steady development, something I like to see in open source games. Our newly incepted project Fortress continues to attract interest and we now have a wiki collecting together information on the both Castles (the game that inspires Fortress) and how we want to see Fortress evolve. Hopefully in the next few weeks a bit of prototyping will occur, but a bit of planning in the meantime should scope out the project nicely. Fortress will also provide me an opportunity to write some articles on the issues that affect open source game development. (I was tempted to write "successfully developing an open source game" but then that's just setting myself up.) Darsana Somebody brings up Darsana in the Ubuntu forums. They call it beautiful , well, that's perhaps a little strong. It does look inte...