Monday, July 02, 2007

The return of Freedroid RPG

Good morning to open source game enthusiasts and any normal people reading. I feel a bit refreshed after getting back to the Internet having spent nearly 48 hours offline. I know, I nearly died, the withdrawl symptoms were horrendous, but it's ok as I am back online now and have been for nearly 12 hours.



So a few things today. Freedroid RPG development has become really active and a string of new releases has occurred in the last couple of weeks. It is a cross platform isometric RPG game similar to Baldur's Gate Diablo only, instead of swords and scantily clad heroines, you have cattle prods and robotic penguins. It's good to see development pick up and they are focusing on making development easier and fixing bugs, so it's looking like a bright future for the game. The latest release is available for Linux and Windows.



Another game that shows off some of the originality that you can find in indie and open source game projects is Which Way Is Up. A platform game with cute-but-not-bad retro graphics, you have to reach a lever which, when activated, rotates the game world. It's quite an intriguing concept and I'm interested in how much mileage can be gotten out of it. There's lots of interesting touches, like enemies that jump when you jump, making for some tough gameplay. It's a lot of fun and development is ongoing. Written using PyGame, it's available for basically any OS that can run Python.



Project Diaspora is a 2D MMORPG space game. I haven't researched it much but it looks like it used to be a commercial game that was shut down a couple of years ago and some fans (or the original developers?) have gotten the (deceased?) company to release the game code under the GPL and set up their own server. Anyway, most game information and screenshots can be found on the Nightsoft.net forums that seem to be especially for Project Diaspora. You can play it on both Linux and Windows.



Busy day today since I was AFK all weekend! Warsow 0.31 is out. I like the project description on Freshmeat:



Warsow is a standalone, eSports-oriented FPS game. It is based on Qfusion, an advanced modification of the Quake 2 engine. It features fast-paced gameplay focused on trix (trick jumps) and art of movement. War§ow features a complete power-up system, including weak and strong fire mode for each weapon in all "normal" gametypes as well as Warshell (battle shield) and Warshock (quad damage) for team-based gametypes. Its cartoonish graphics use cel shading with a style that is similar but not identical to Manga.


I haven't been able to load happypenguin.org since I got back. That site has been up and down like a yo yo lately. Oh well, people have Free Gamer to read so that's ok. ;-)



Seriously though, I'm thinking of procuring a domain name (as suggested in the FG forums) and then possibly migrating the lists to a host outside of Blogger - probably a sourceforge.net project. I'm wary that having the lists on Blogger will mess up RSS and that maintaining the lists in HTML is just not scaling. If I move the lists (not the blog, the blog stays) to Sourceforge, then I can use a proper database and have user ratings and comments etc. Saying that, all this talk of game lists is a bit weak when I've left them in a mess for the last couple of months but, hey, I'm a busy guy. :-)

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Freedroid is like BG? More like Diablo ;)

Charlie said...

That's it... dammit. I couldn't remember the name Diablo when writing but did mean to go back and fix it once I remembered - only I forgot.

Too many indiscresions at the weekend!

Anonymous said...

You are definitely very keen on this blog and you constantly impress me every time I check it. You can get yourself a domain name, and use drupal as CMS.
Good luck!

hikaricore said...

Anyone else get a kick out of droid 883 and his look alike?

Andrew said...

FreeDroid sounds great and all but it will never replace Diablo 2 and i'd much prefer a clone.

hikaricore said...

It's not supposed to replace it, the game play is just similar. It's a fantastic game all on it's own.

Anonymous said...

Hikari: Yeah. That gag was in the original Paradroid, too.

Anonymous said...

Many thanks for the Freedroid RPG reminder.

The last ParaDroid-inspired games I played were kinda boring (including "FreeDroid Classic"). Not bad, but a bit too retro.

But this game is pure fun to play ... sometimes a bit too serious, but the story is pretty entertaining (a rare thing among OS games sadly). Not to speak of the vast amount of hidden gags (Leg vs. NetBSD anyone?) in the dialogs, descriptions of objects and names :)

Also the tactic (hacking) one can use to avoid fights (especially the hard ones) are very encouraging 8)

A lot of kudos to the developers and a cry to all who read this to have a look at the game and maybe even help them get more artwork.

Provide feedback:

Due to SPAM issues we have disabled public commenting here.

But feel free to join our forums or easily chat via IRC with us.