Release Changelog Bullets: Los, SaR2, HoA, NatR

Lips of Suna - 0.4.0

• Lots of sound effects.
• Master server and server browser.
• Climbing over obstacles.
• Merchants and trading.
• Attacks can be charged by holding the attack button.
• Projectiles and sword swings have speed lines.
• Controls can be customized in-game.
• Basic blood effects and beheading.
• More flexible map generation algorithm.
• Improved aer female, android female and kraken models.
• New items: crossbow, musket, revolver, barrel, bookcase, dewspring leaf, fruit.
• New spells: berserk, dig, firewall, light, travel.
• New quests: Brigands, Mining Guild, Sword on the Stone.

Search and Rescue II - 2.3.0

• Copyrighted Guadarrama scenery textures replaced with public domain ones in order to avoid licensing problems
• Small bugixes
• OpenSuse packages have been updated as well

Hero of Allacrost - June 2011 Unstable Release

• Two brand new maps with many scripted events that develop the beginning plot of the main story
• Enter/exit sequences in battle to smooth the transition from map exploration to battle execution
• Better display of battle damage and status indicator text and images
• Receiving damage causes a brief stun on the stamina bar, allowing you to delay opponents actions slightly
• New skills available to use, some of which can target an entire party
• Attack points have specific stat modifiers (for defense and evasion)
• Targeting certain attack points may invoke status effects. For example, targeting legs to reduce agility
• Enemy's are no longer "leveled up" to match the party's strength
• If the player loses a battle, they have the option to restart the battle from the beginning, taking a penalty on XP/drunes earned upon victory
• Two new enemies to fight, one of which is a boss-type

Nikki and the Robots - 0.3 + 0.3.1

• Prettier on-screen display elements
• Editor bug fixed
• Slowdown bug fixed on many systems

Open Source RPGs coming up: Dawn RPG, OSARE, FreeDink, Hero of Allacrost, FoI

tinyogg

The future FOSS Diablo-and-more-like Open Source Action RPG Engine has an art style which I can approve of. (I do not approve of the Diablo-and-more-like FreeDroid RPG's art style.)

OSARE will be close to feature complete in Fall 2010.

I assume this means that it will be a working action rpg engine with enemies, items and skills, but no plot or story, ready to be turned into a game.

If you feel that you can contribute something matching high quality of this project, check out the tasks page!

login2download

Dawn has very nice graphics and a decent demo with items, a fetch quest, enemies and spells. It's hard to beat -- but easy to exploit, due to pathfinding/collision fun stuffs.

Communication seems to work via mailing lists.

There's a little list of things I don't like:

1. Slow walking speed (needs a run button)
2. Huge sprite masks/collision boxes
3. Two very Zelda™/Link®-like looking sprites..

tinyogg

Hero of Allacrost's release policy experiments result to a release early, release often philosophy.

There is a HoA subforum which is visible only to registered users, for discussion of the game's design. I find it irritating that a large part of discussions is hidden from non-registered lurkers, when it might attract participation. I wonder what other's think about such practice, which has also found its place in the DungeonHack project in this subforum, which is used for discussing a mini-plot/'module' called "Spider Forest". Please comment your experiences with partially hiding game dev discussions if you have any.

HoA also has forums that are developer-only, which feels very non-open to me (because it isn't :) ) but on the other hand the project is supposed to be 'closed' in the sense of 'dedicated developers instead of casual contributors'. What do you think about having part of the development hidden unless you 'promise' to become a dedicated developer?

Funnily enough, there are many projects which have 'closed' communication due to the simple fact that there are many users and developers who don't want to use mailing lists (in my opinion they are usually not usable for browsing, google groups should be acceptable for people used to forums, but GNU mailman is horrible in its default state, if you want to have an overview over existing threads.)

tinyogg

Fall of Imiryn: Hardly anything new about it. A few tweaks there and here in the svn.. If someone wants to test this, I'm looking into polishing the game so it can be 'finished' via a 'last' release. It is playable from start to end right now, but might be enhanced with a few content, without breaking any backs or endlessly continuing development. :) (suggestions welcome)

spoilers - tinyogg

The ..weird.. crazy action-RPG Dink Smallwood was released as open source (minus sounds and music) and is being developed as FreeDink.

I will try to spend some time for adding sfx to FreeDink - haven't started yet, even though I have quite the plan. I will use a github repository. Of course anybody is welcome to join in and there's probably nobody working on looking for music to add to FreeDink.

Hopefully there will be a 'full' release without missing audio soon.

Not a game, just an UI thought - gpl/bySa source - base

Let's have a little rant, shall we? X.org (the thing that makes Linux have graphics) often crashes, when a game force-fullscreens on me. This makes a sad qubodup D:. I wish games would have a 'select your video/audio configuration' window before game start or just start in windowed mode. :)

Hero of Allacrost 0.2.2, Teeworlds 0.4.3, GamePwned

Toying with Hero of Allacrost 0.2.2's Editor(HD)

Hero of Allacrost 0.2.2 has been released and now needs a new home! It is house-trained and can be picked up 24/7 from it's SourceForge shelter.

One can now enter buildings (in a pleasant no-transition way) and an editor is now included. I gave the editor a try.

My first thought was: "What a waste of energy! Why did they not incorporate Tiled, as for example Battle Tanks did?" But then I remembered that my last encounter with the general purpose Java editor. It showed me that instead of being able to completely rely on Tiled, a team would have to create an extra tool for tasks that go beyond map editing. At least a team of non-Java programmers (Allacrost is in C++ and Lua).

Allacrost's editor will go beyond tiles. When it's finished, it will also be a character, skills and inventory editor and will support integration of music/sounds.

Greg Cannon blocking the view on STK ;)

GamePwned is a freeware and open source games blog. A video-review of VDrift and SuperTuxKart was recently posted on it. (The third one, HoverRace, has a weird license). Reminds me of the time when freeware titles were often mentioned on Free Gamer. Mid-1980s IIRC.

I wonder if Sauce The Game is ever going to happen again...

Teewars Teeworlds 0.4.3

Teewars Teeworlds 0.4.3 is out and some of the changes indicate a wide player base: auto team balance and anti-spam fixes. I gave the game a try a minute ago and the fun and prettiness and cuteness are there! Unfortunately I'm no fan of grapple hooks.

Teewars' Teeworlds' license is a bugger though. Instead of "please don't sell this game" is says "you have to include a hello world app if you want to sell this game".

On the other hand, ladies and gentlemen: the bikeshed.

Foobar

iSoccer Concept

Open World Soccer

iSoccer ist und... wait... I'm English, why am I sprechen sie Deutsch? Must be Q's influence...

iSoccer is a promising project to create an arcade football game in the vein of Sensible Soccer and Football Glory. It was started in April by members of the iTeam project. It's early days but the concept (right) looks beautiful. I hope they can pull it off.

The "other" Sensi-like project is Open World Soccer (by the creators of the now discontinued Yoda Soccer project).

Fans of the genre should check out both projects and fans-with-skills (aka programmers) should contribute because an awesome little soccer game is sorely missed on the FOSS game scene.

On a more ambitious front, Open Football is alive and kicking and had a steady stream of commits over the summer. It's still in concept phase but it's not far from having the foundation to become a playable game. Trying out the SVN version is already quite interesting with quite a few different tests of the engine, although only 1 shows the signs of being a football game (you can run a player around and dribble with the ball).

Who is up for a solving a mystery? There's this game, Race Racer. It's a supposedly open source game, definitely exists, but any links of any use are dead (the forums, wiki, www.openracer.org, www.raceracer.org all down). Videos (eg1, eg2) were posted as late as October 2007. It's this promising open source game... just there's no source about? I'll donate a packet of chocolate chip cookies to whomever can get to the bottom of it.

Oooo almost forgot. There's a new Allacrost release. All the juicy gossip is on the website, hopefully this signals a recovery for the project that had somewhat stalled over the summer season.

Allo Allo with Allacrost

Ok, I've been slacking. I could make excuses (please somebody tell me a cheat so I can complete level 50 of Kobo Deluxe) but I won't.

Another Hero of Allacrost release is up for grabs on their website. This version does bring a few new features to the current tech demo status of the project, but it's a major rewrite of several parts so versions will hopefully be coming thicker and faster in the next few months.

I tried it out and it's impressive, although not very expansive yet. If they can keep up the production quality and go on to make a full game, it's going to be an amazing game indeed.

Fortress WIP

There has been plenty of work on the project that was started here earlier this year - Fortress. Check out the castle components courteousy of our very own povray magician, Rushhour. There'll be a playable tech demo soon so I'll post news of that when it arrives!

Sun Dog Resurrection is a project to make a Free Software successor to the classic game Sun Dog for the Apple II (now that's going back a ways). What makes this project interesting is that it's the original Sun Dog game author who instigated it. They had been a bit stagnant but there's activity on the sf.net project page.

Project Apricot got it's blog going. It's syndicated on the FreeGameDev planet, as are many other Free Software game project / developer blogs, so if you enjoy this blog then the planet is a good place for you to go as well.

To do - do the to do

I have a few things to do - notably:

• Integerate the planet feed


• Integrate the announcements feed


• Integrate the forum feed


• Organise another interview or two


• Finish my half finished articles that are steadily building as a backlog of drafts

We have all this shiney new infrastructure after some brilliant work by notably Ghoulsblade and Hagish, and I'm dragging my toes including it. Sorry guys!

The planet and the announcements really could get included in any site which would really help to push Free Game development to another level in terms of being accessible and reaching it's audience with minimum effort.

On the Free game side of things, my multiple commitments (notably work and Fortress which I'm trying to get the codebase moving properly) mean I'm not really following the open source game scene as closely as I used to.

Silver Tree

The open source RPG scene is looking quite healthy at the moment. Silver Tree is shaping up well and seems to be shifting away from it's graphical ties with Wesnoth.

There's an update on the Hero of Allacrost website. There's good progress so it looks like they'll have another release before Christmas of this Final Fantasy style game. They also want to make a change to the current battle system because the current one is too demanding on the artists.

Also the Galaxy Mage Redux project is gaining a bit of momentum.

Damn, got to go, will try and be more elaborate tomorrow!

8 Kingdoms and Strategy

8 Kingdoms

Legacy of Magic

8 Kingdoms is a 3D turn based fantasy strategy game. Build empires and conquer enemy kingdoms. I came across it in the Ubuntu forums where the poster suggested the graphics were not that great. Well, the graphics look pretty good to me. In fact I quite like the plastic-like model style. It gives the game an interesting look and feel. The game is at version 1.0 so is fully playable. :-)

The map is hex based which also intrigues me. I always find hex more fascinating than boring square grids. There is only a Windows installer and a tar.gz available for download, so non-Windows players will probably have to compile it themselves.

Keeping on the strategy theme, I came across a game I'd lost the link for a while back. Legacy of Magic is a very promising looking fantasy war game. The homepage is a development blog although there has been no update since November 2006 so I'm going to email the author to see how he is getting on. It would be a shame for such a nice looking game to cease development.

Another upcoming open source strategy game seems to have lost it's way a little - the Galaxy Mage website is down [so that link won't work] but the code is always available from it's project page. The last code change was only a couple of months ago so hopefully the website will be back up soon and work resumed.

There's an interesting update on the Allacrost website regarding development. Basically they tackled the major architectural hurdles in the 0.2.0 release - the rather nice consequence of which is there will be much less time before the next release. :-D

Also the Egoboo Resurrection project released version 2.3.8 of their continuation efforts for this classic open source RPG game. It introduces new levels and bug fixes, but still is only being built for Windows although the game has strong Linux roots so surely will still be compilable should somebody take it on. I think they just don't have Linux expertise amongst the development group at the moment so head on over there if you think you can help out.

Not quite open source games, but I found this open source Java virtual PC rather fascinating and the 3 demo pages (1, 2, 3) have it running DOS (FreeDOS maybe?) loaded with several of the classic games of the DOS era such as Prince of Persia and Lemmings. Quite a nostalgic way to pass a few minutes of time for the elder gamers amongst us. Anyway, a quick reminder to help you get started:

C:
dir
cd prince
prince

Allacrost Update, Simutrans Source

Two major pieces of open source game news today. :-D

Hero of Allacrost 0.2.0 is now available, with easy installation on Windows, Linux (Ubunto/Debian packages), MacOSX, and FreeBSD. Additional platform support seems planned too, an impressive effort to get the game readily available for people to play. This version celebrates the 3rd anniversary of the inception of the project and it is great to see the vision of the original developer(s) being realised. The highlights of their second major release are:

• Free-range movement replacing tile-based movement


• Two excellent new maps to explore


• No more random encounters


• You can now buy and sell wares from shop keepers


• A newly added stamina bar in the battle interface


• The ability to gain experience levels and make your character grow stronger


• Plenty of additional music to enjoy

After what seems like a millenia as a freeware game, the source code for Simutrans is now available for download. :-)

The source is licensed under the artistic license, whatever that is. Anyway, it is included in the source download (available for the latest release 0.99.12) so read it if you are interested. I don't think they have opened up the development process completely (i.e. their tools such as their subversion server) but it's a start and there are now support forums for compiling and submitting patches, which should turn Simutrans into more of a community project.

The game has come on a lot in the last few years, and this move should IMHO only improve the development situation. Already a few good patches have been submitted to fix some crashes. Many eyes and all.

Hi, my name's Charlie, and I'm addicted to Desktop Tower Defense. Well, not completely, but it does eat up time quickly if you are not careful. Anyway, compare your scores to mine if you think you are good enough. ;-)

Allacrost and Free Allegiance

Hero of Allacrost

There's some new screenshots over at the Hero of Allacrost project. It is looking really nice these days and they have come a long way. They are looking for people to help test out their next release so head on over to their forums if you are interested. :-)

Speaking of forums, have you registered for the Free Gamer Forum yet? Why not? ;-)

Bloboats - a side-scrolling race against the clock whilst dodging obstacles by using the way the boat interacts with the water. Think X-Moto meets the sea. It is cross platform but only Windows binaries are officially provided :-( so you either have to compile from source or try the unofficial Mandriva 2007 rpms or hope the guys at getdeb get on it. (I'm an Ubuntu user, can't you tell!?)

Free Allegiance is the open source community effort spawned from Microsoft releasing the source code to their [now abandoned] game Allegiance. (See, MS are not all evil, just mostly.) Damn, I forgot to mention this a while back when I did an article on open source 3D space games.

Free Allegiance

Free Allegiance is a multiplayer teamplay-oriented 3D space combat game. I like the fact that it focuses on teamplay. It can be difficult for new players (don't make me say n00bs) to get into online games with more experienced players mopping them up repeatedly. However if it is a team game, the experienced players can take on leadership roles, and by virtue of that, mentoring those of lesser ability experience.

Oh, and the game looks pretty too. Always a plus. :-D

Super Retro Mega Wars... at the moment, just a blog on the development of a retro mega game - a multiplayer environment where each player gets to choose the type of game they play (all game types based on retro classics) and somehow the game types get mixed together. Anyway, it's an intriguing concept so I'm gonna keep an eye on it.

I should probably give Second Life a mention at some point... it is open source after all. Just they don't really need the marketing help. And I think games should be fun and immersive but not a second life. Right?

The title of today's blog post is so unimaginative. I'm not feeling very creative today.

VDrifting Away

Free Gamer has been on hiatus. Sorry! Sometimes these things happen...

VDrift made a new release yesterday.

Hero of Allocrost released their first tech demo. Thanks to Roots for notifying me and apologies to him for taking a week to say something.

Sauerbraten got forked, the new game is called Extended Death Match (or just EDM). I don't know if it is a cooperative fork. All I know is you can leave sticky notes around the maps.

There's tons of other things I could mention from the last 2 weeks but for now I'll just push you in the direction of the Linux Game Tome which covers most of the them in one way or another.

*Goes back to his corner to work slowly on updating the Free Gamer games list*

Hero of Allacrost

Hero of Allacrost

Hero of Allacrost is a Free single player 2D RPG game that's been in development for some time without any real release. Posted in the Wesnoth forums (rather than their own) is an update on the status of the game which is looking like it could see at least a playable demo release in the near future.

I must admit that after the initial flurry of activity that followed the initial talk about this game in late 2004 and early 2005, it seemed to have suffered the usual "my dream game" death that afflicts a lot of early start-up Free games. However it looks like the main developer(s) was patiently plugging away and congratulations on what looks like shaping up to be a fine game.

A while ago I mentioned Stunt Playground, a free stunt car racer game that was released under the GPL. Well, the same guy Walaber has released another freeware (not GPL) game - a rather cool looking 3D trampolining simulator called, er, Trampoline. Check out the website for screenshots and video links. Sadly it is Windows only.

Slightly off-topic, I was thinking about ways to make my Google ads campaign pay out a little better. I get ~250 (to ~300) views a day and make about $4 a month from this. I've been trying to redesign the site a little for a while. Breaking down the pages (i.e. have the games list on a separate page) might help as might presenting the posts as a summary linked to a separate article page. However my primary concern is not making money but presenting good information - i.e. I don't want people annoyed by ads or having to click too many times. Have we got any readers with good tips or advice? Site improvement ideas not releated to Google ads are welcome!