Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Red Eclipse 1.0

The Red Eclipse project, forked from the now-defunct Blood Frontier project, has made it's first release - Red Eclipse 1.0: Ides Edition. It has been continuous under heavy development, as was BF before it, but the RE team took their time over a release opting to "Get Things Right" first*. Thus, the '1.0' should be an accurate reflection; solid gameplay, stable game, and embodies the majority of the game design the developers first envisaged.

It claims to have both single- and multi-player modes. At time of writing, the website has no about page, no details on the game other than the very basics (genre, platforms, etc). I am told that, in the single player game, you lead a squad through a series of zombie-infested maps. Who doesn't love zombies?!

Gameplay is described as 'agile' so it's frantic and fast-paced with acrobatics and super powered weaponry.

Red Eclipse is based on the Cube 2: Sauerbraten engine, so comes with a very powerful built-in map editing and the stability and graphical capabilities of one of the most mature Free Software FPS engines.

EDIT - updated to a better trailer. If you want to see the previous trailer, go here, but it's naff so just watch the one below.

Also Red Eclipse has applied for a forum on FreeGameDev.net which is another boost for the community.

* Note that I am a big believer in 'release early, release often' but the Red Eclipse team had the activity levels and situation to be able to be successful by holding off, partly because Red Eclipse SVN was nearly always playable and partly because a lot of the work had been done in the guise of Sauerbraten and the play testing, tweaking, and feedback from Blood Frontier.