Gaming Daily A-Z

In the second Free Gamer interview - over 2 years since the first with grumbel - serial Free game developer Steven Carlyle-Smith (UK) aka Me_Programmer Games aka Steve16384 was kind enough to take the time to reply in detail to my questions about his development activities. Steve has created a plethora of Free games over the years. Whilst they have struggled to gain mindshare - usually he moves on at speed to new projects before completing others - there's a lot of content to peruse and I thought his experiences were more than worth tapping for advise to budding game developers. He has created all his games with little or no community help other than occasionally reusing resources from other projects. He also maintains blog on his development efforts which is often witty . You can ask questions / get support / give feedback for Steve's games in the new FreeGameDev forum for Me_Programmer Games . There you can also find an exhaustive list of his playable game projects, i...

Some breaking, amazing news related to one of the most exciting freeware Free game projects on the indie scene: What is 0 A.D.? 0 A.D. is a free, cross-platform, under-development, 3D, historically-based, real-time strategy game. What are you doing? Switching from a closed development process to open source: making the code available as GPL and the art content available as CC-BY-SA, and encouraging external contributions. We've been working on 0 A.D. in our free time for years, and now we want to show what we've achieved and make it easier for more people to get involved. How can I get started? See the Getting Started guide to find more information about the game, forums for discussion, instructions for building and running the game, and links to further details. For the full announcement, see the dedicated page for explaining why they moved to open source from the closed development model. For more media and information on the game, go to the official 0 A.D. website . Thi...

Berusky Berusky - Stuck! Berusky is a "free logic game". It's a puzzle game of Sokoban-like gameplay with a few extra twists. You have control of up to 5 bugs, and you must collect 5 silver keys on each level before you can exit it. You can push explosives into barrels, and destroy boulders with pick axes that you collect. Throw in one-way gates, coloured gates and coloured keys, and gates for specific colour bugs and there's a lot of potential obstacles and some wickedly tricky levels. The graphics are nice. There's no music. The game has not been fully translated into English, so some of the level hints (well, most of them) are appearing in Czech(?). And it's bloody hard. As hard as Fish Fillets ( Free Gamer review ), if not harder. (Interestingly, Fish Fillets is also Czech produced.) I couldn't work out how to beat * the first level on intermediate or the 3rd level on easy. The interface outside of the game isn't that great - using pa...

FreeTumble is yet another "destroy adjacent same-color bricks" puzzle game but one of the better-looking and -sounding ones. Three modes of gameplay are provided, they can be seen as variation of the same game for different types of puzzle players or different hardness modes. FreeTumble - I much like that there is a credits screen Biniax-2 is an original puzzle game in which colors also play a role and which also is stronger on the visual side than your typical open source Tetris clone. It features a turn-based and continuous mode. The latter can be played with two players in a versus-game. Biniax-2 (no sound) Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection will help you if you're bored at the office or similar. CreepSmash is a java-based multiplayer tower defense game. Have some videos of it too! 26 June 06:09 UTC PS : RubyWeekend #3 with the theme "A Tiny World" started a few hours ago. It's a 3-day open source ruby game programming competition.

Go Ollie An open source platformer I missed yesterday is Go Ollie . It's easy to overlook, I mean, worms are not exactly a glamorous topic. Whilst I'm not sure about the license (somebody care to check? I'm busy!) the game itself is polished and fun. The controls are different to your typical platformer, where instead of moving and jumping your character directly, you select where he moves to with the mouse. Places that can be reached are highlighted, so it's about picking the right path and having the reflexes to do it quickly enough, which can be tricky on scrolling levels. It seems to be a gift to the Linux community from game makers Tweeler. The graphics and presentation look professional. It's a great game for kids as well as a fun time waster for adults. <update> Actually Go Ollie is by Charlie Dog Games , but Tweeler acts as a download host for the Mac/Linux version. Also, it is definitely open source - code is GPLv3 and artwork CC-by-sa with ex...

I thought I'd check out how Super Tux development is going. I grabbed the lastest svn, compiled, and performance was so abominable that it took me a minute just to quit. It didn't help that it was placed half-off the screen (probably because I have a dual screen setup) Super Tux used to run fine. I'll hold my hands up and say I'm using an nvidia chipset and the open source driver without any significant OpenGL Acceleration, but it's a 2D game . I hope they work on some kind of OpenGL-less fallback. Mole Invasion One little-known but very promising platformer is Mole Invasion . The website is mainly in French, but there is a dedicated English page . The game language defaults to English. The current release is version 0.4, and the first thing you notice is the Mario-like logo; obviously the inspiration for the gameplay. The second thing you notice is the performance - it runs great. It's really smooth, the animations are good, the characters move well,...

Wesnoth Knight Battle for Wesnoth continues to get stupendously good art contributions such as this series of Loyalist portraits . Hot on the heels of Extreme Tux Racer 0.5beta, contributor and original Tux Racer developer Erin has introduced his rewrite to the world. Tentatively named Bunny Hill, the rewrite has a better design resulting in better performance, nicer graphics (in some ways, lesser in others) and more features. It looks like it will probably become ETR 0.6 once the dust has settled. PARPG Weapons PARPG is back from the dead . 3 weeks not blogging being 'dead' apparently. The project itself is thriving, with plenty of graphical creativeness whilst the coders assess their options for developing the game. Unknown Horizons will have a new release very soon ! Widelands is getting randomly generated maps . Simutrans Subways It looks like Simutrans is getting subways, at least pak96.comic is anyway. Subterranean! There'll be loads more updates to your ...