Libre Software Meeting Call for Papers

Developers of free and open source games!

The Libre Software Meeting in Brussels is looking for talks about the "Free Gaming World".

An ideal place to introduce your project, talk about how to work with other people on open source game projects and meet other free software developers!


The deadline for submission is 31 March 2013!

Some previous talks, if you're not sure what to expec or what they expect from you:

• How do blind people play (computer) games
• Arthur Huillet: Anatomy of a role playing game (FreedroidRPG)
• Games engines done good

Brood Hunter?

Today I have a real "underground & secret" game: no website, no description, no nothing really... just a forum post and some cool game-play videos:





It seems to be called "Brood Hunter" and is quite obviously a Gloom inspired Quake1 mod.

However given that it most likely used the GPL Darkplaces Engine (same as Xonotic) and since game-play looks great, I have to do some wishful thinking here and hope it will be released as an open-source game so that we can work on replacing the remaining non-free Quake1 content at some point :)

Oh and I also stumbled upon an open-source Daikatana remake, using a heavily modified Quake1 engine. YES, that Daikatana!

Red Eclipse 1.4 and a missed birthday

Good news is that the long awaited Red Eclipse version 1.4 was released yesterday.
Read the announcement (with full change-log) here. Besides general polish the most notable features are:

• Vanity items and improved colours: dress up and frag with style.
• Visible legs in first person: know where you are kicking and parkouring.
• New and revamped maps: bringing you even more variety.
• Better viewing: level flythroughs, improved third and first person cameras.
• Better menus and other HUD elements: easier to see and read at a glance.
• New weapon: Mines add a new dimension to the existing gameplay.
• New mode: attack and defend in Gauntlet, competing for the most laps.
• Automatic demo recording: for those times you just have to watch it again.
• User Accounts: donate or contribute, and wear the in-game supporter badge.
• Improved weapon balance and gameplay rules, bugs fixed, and much more.

Especially the visible legs in 1st person view add to the parcour movements and overall the game feels much more "complete" now. Here are some impressions of a bot-match I had earlier on:

The bad news is  that we missed Xonotic's third birthday, but you can still congratulate here (where you can also read about some pretty cool updates to the game). To celebrate it, kojin made a nice frag movie:


Enjoy!

The Castle Doctrine: New Jason Rohrer MMO

Jason Rohrer is a quite controversial independent game developer with a track record of thought provoking games. His latest offering (in alpha state for 50% off sale with public domain source code included) The Castle Doctrine is a MMO about "burglary and home defense". Better than I could do it here shortly, these two (1, 2) articles give you an idea what the game is about.

Build defenses to protect your family or is it just another puzzle to solve?

The interesting twist is that you are (can be?) both a home intruder and responsible for building defenses for your own home. In a sense it is thus a player created puzzle solving game if you look at it from a more game design (abstract) point of view. It however also rises some ethical questions about how you deal with the theme of the arms race between intruders and home defenders. In either way, it sounds like a fun game though :)

On an unrelated note, one of the guys behind last year's successful FOSS board game Kickstarter project A Las Barricadas, is now looking for financial subscriptions for him to create more FOSS art (CC-by) and to take some art classes the same time. If that sounds like a good way to spend your hard earned cash, check out some of his previous works here.

Are We Alone? Atmospheric 2D

Are We Alone screenshot: Safe on Earth

Let's Play Are We Alone?

Are We Alone - a space game where you travel from planet to planet, between star systems in search of intelligent life - has been released on Github under MIT license.

It was made for Ludum Dare 22 "alone" and is a quite atmospheric piece.

Code License: MIT

Content License: Unknown

Shunned Survivor: MMORTS Tower Defense

Defending your outpost in Shunned Survivor

Shunned Survivor Commentary Video

Shunned Survivor is one of the entries for PyWeek #15 September 2012 "One Way Trip".

In the genre mix between MMORTS, city building, economy simulation and tower defense game, you control an exiled human, with the apparent goal to get back to earth.

The interaction with other players is quite indirect. You can attack other player's bases and win the "data" resource this way, which you need to perform "research" actions. However, defeating a base does not change it, you simply get the reward and can attack again.

Shunned Survivor Server map

While researching, however, you need to perform in a tower defense minigame, during which your defensive towers can be destroyed. If you succeed, the research was successful. If not, you have to enforce your defenses and try again.

Even though quite a bit of the gameplay time is spent on waiting for resources to be generated by the various resource gathering buildings, I find this game very entertaining and highly recommend you to give it a try.

Code License: CC0
Content License: CC0

Erebus RPG for Desktop, Tablet and Smartphone

Video: Erebus - Open Source RPG for Android, Linux and Symbian

Erebus is a hack & slash role-playing game under heavy development, yet playable with currently three missions.

Features:

• Classic point-n-click style RPG, with dungeons to explore, enemies to fight, NPCs to talk to, sub-quests to complete, scenery to interact with, weapons, treasure and other items to find.

• Also supports Rogue-like keyboard controls.

• Multiple quests (currently three, more will be added as development progresses!)

• Choice of starting characters (currently Barbarian, Elf, Halfling, Ranger, Warrior).

• Start straight into the action - none of this "For your first quest, please find your next door neighbour's pet cat".

• Vector-based world rather than tile-based - so items/scenery can be placed in any position, or aligned in any direction.

• 2D animated graphics, with zoom in/out, and lighting effects.

• Completely free and Open Source - no ads, unlike many free Android apps.

• User interface optimised to work with mouse, keyboard and/or touchscreen.

• Cross-platform - available for Windows, Linux, Nokia Symbian and Android devices.

Code License: GPLv3+
Content License: Various (Most DFSG approved, CC-BY 2.x might be problematic)

Free Orion 0.4.2

A few day ago a much improved version of the 4X space strategy game FreeOrion was released. Check out this cool set of introduction videos (Part 1, 2, 3):



Most notable additons:

• Very much improved, non-cheating AI. Sometimes experienced 4X players loose.
• Many GUI enhancements and shortcuts.
• Galactopedia expanded with game mechanics articles and many cross-links.
• Batch production of ships now possible.
• Improved sitrep notifications
• Reworked stealth and detection
• Almost everything has been enhanced, reworked, and better balanced.

So go and kick some alien butt ;)

Gigalomania, LPC and updates

Some of you might remember Mega Lo Mania back from the days when you could be amazed by PC speaker voice output... so if you spend way too much of your childhood playing that game (like me) you should probably stay clear of the FOSS remake called Gigalomania!

Gigalomania now using LPC sprites

As the creator recently stated, it now uses the cool Liberated Pixels Cup contest sprites, but there is still the need to replace the castle graphics with nicer ones. Maybe *you* can help out with that?

On a related note, the LPC coding results are finally in, congratulations to the winners! I hope Bart will make a nice review on the quite awesome games here on FG soon.

Other recent updates not to be missed:

• Today a new Alpha 13 of Unvanquished was released, marking the one year aniversary of their first alpha release. As usual it comes with a bunch of new nice features and fixes.
• You can now download automatic snapshots of the development version of Megaglest. And there seems to be finally some progress in updating the graphic capabilities of the engine.
• O A.D. continues to amaze with news updates about development progress and music creation.
• And last but not least: the awesome Xonotic mod Overkill now has a website!

That's all for now :)