Gaming Daily A-Z

Julius' endless poking has sent me over the cliff of post-guilt, fortunately, lots of projects have been jumping up and down for attention of late, so I have quite a bit of content to redeem myself with. RPGs OSARE OSARE showing off powers Pfunked and recently released an update to the promising OSARE This brings "powers" to the game, the classic Hack 'n Slash abilities that encompass magic, melee and ranged special attacks. No skimping on them here either, intricate systems such as block-counter based attacks and time stopping magic spells definitely differentiate OSARE's powers from the more generic "Do x damage" spells more commonly found. The new powers do bring in a bit of a balance issue though, but such is the nature of RPGs Dawn RPG Dawn RPG Dawn-RPG has also been updating steadily throughout the year; I kind of forgot about the project and should be punished appropriately :P Main recent additions are sound an music (from the illustrious OGA...

Hello again from the dark side of the moon (at least it's equally remote ;) ). Today I have some assorted news of projects previously featured and one new one. Lets start with the latter: ArcanumAlive or OpenArcanum is a engine re-implemention and assets replacement project for the game Arcanum . It somewhat recently also got a Linux port , and seems to be progressing nicely so far/ again . ArcanumAlive Some RTS news Totally unrelated, the previously featured MegaGlest has been updated to version 3.3.7 which brings a series of nice improvements to the game (including a MacOSX port). Some time ago a much improved version of the WW2 themed RTS Spring1944 was released, and the engine it is based on also got a bunch of updates lately. Finally some FPS news For the readers with a short attention span, I left the FPS news for the very last (so that they don't read it :p). Recently Irritant the creator of AlienArena released some news about the upcoming version, called 2011. The...

Quite literally, as I am posting this via a satellite connection from the other side of the world ;) But if those lazy co-authors spend all their time playing games instead of bringing you the latest FreeGaming news, then I have to come to the rescue no matter what! For those that are disappointed that the blog isn't updated more regularly... well tough luck :p There is our planet feed though, and you can also hang out on the forums... or *gasp* try to get involved in a project yourself! Mission X, side scrolling action This pretty nice, old school, side scrolling shooter (written in Java) can be found here . Check out the video below: Mission X Lots of eye-candy over at the 0 A.D. webpage Amazing amount of nice looking stuff, and progress updates (f.e. implementation of the "shadow of war" feature) has been recently added to the 0 A.D. website. I know you are probably following that game anyways... but a quick reminder can hurt ;) 0 A.D. landscape Red Eclipse Sadly I c...

Rejoice! Now you can become the CEO of a multinational evil energy empire on your home PC. Build as many nuclear power plants as you always wished, destroy the world's climate with coal electrification and make a big advertisement campaign to greenwash your evil plans with some wind-mills ;) Energy Tycoon You can download this great looking game called Energy Tycoon , for Windows and Linux, and the source-code is available under a MIT/BSD like license. It includes some non-free parts however (e.g. irrklang AFAIK) and the media license is unclear, but it's rare that such a polished game shows up as open-source more or less out of nowhere. Quick selection of other news A rather interesting GPL licensed racing project was recently released for the Blender game engine (BGE): SAAB-91 Virtual Race . Interesting especially because it seems to have some sort of official support by the designers of the car, but currently it is still at a very early stage. It's also nice to see th...

Neotron Games These guys have compiled quite a selection of quality, complete games. Actually, to such an extent, one could say that they are one of the most prolific open source game devs out there, even if not all of their works are completely "open". Most of their games are compatible with the GPX-Wiz, and hopefully the Pandora once Bennu , the language they use for developing their games, gets an official port. Before we were Dead : Under the sea RPG Play as one of 4 fishy characters, all with their own individual abilities and personalities in an atmospheric underwater world. Explore the multitude of scenic aquatic environs and immerse yourself in the lore presented through branching NPC dialogue and interaction, the choices you make being apparent as the game progresses. This of course means that there is a lot of text to read, so I wouldn't quite recommend the game if you just want a quick blast of arcadey action... Nether Dimensional Runner : Trippy Platformer Fa...

Wait... isn't this Free Gamer? Why do you have a commercial game on your blog about free games? Well... because it is free, just not as in beer ;) Okok, the first episode is even free as in beer :p What am I talking about? Steel Storm , an indie arcade top-down shooter: Steel Storm Episode I trailer Steel Storm is based on the GPL engine Darkplaces , and its media license is even "almost" FOSS too with the CC-BY-NC-SA license . This makes it possible to use its engine enhancements (like a in-game editor, a really nice menu system, etc) also in other open-source games! I think this is actually not a bad compromise between trying to cover some expenses and still making open-source games, and that commercial efforts are not strictly incompatible with FOSS game development can be discussed here ;) It would be cool though, if they would consider a "ransom" design also, i.e. that the game becomes completely FOSS after a certain sum of sales has been reached. Oh and...

Hot news for today! A project unknown to me so far just released its first alpha of their upcoming open-source RTS Galactic Vice . It's still at a very early phase, and they are looking for contributors , but as you can see in this video (action starts at 0:45) it's looking like a great start already: Galactic Vice RTS Alpha1 Their aim is to create a RTS similar to Starcraft2 or Dawn of War, and they are making good progress towards this goal. Currently you can even download the alpha binaries for Linux64bit and windows 32bit . Very interesting is also their approach to create a tile based 3D map system, for which some examples can be found here . They are also plan on using Blender3D as their content creation tool, which is cool ;) Not so cool is that only the source code is GPLv3, while the data is CC-NC-ND >:( Edit: They plan on releasing the data also somehow under the GPL... lets wait and see how exactly. Edit2: After some discussions I was able to convince them to l...