Keeping up with KeeperRL: alpha 28 released, improves mod support

It has been a while since we last spoke of KeeperRL. The hybrid blend of dungeon building sim with roguelike features seems to be doing rather well, with a growing community and regular progress updates. The latest alpha has just been released, and this time it has a flavor for modding.

Let's keep an eye out for Cytopia

With city builder games climbing back into popularity, it was about time for a serious libre project to tackle the genre once again. After many years of abandoned efforts, it is now the turn of Cytopia to try to scratch that itch.

Blackvoxel, an ambitious Minecraft/Factorio mix?

Check out this interesting (somewhat recently GPLv3 re-licensed) game Blackvoxel:



As you can see it has some interesting mechanic which they call "Molecular Voxel Interaction Engine". As seen in the trailer above, it basically allows you to automate crafting, resulting in interesting "programmable" factory setups.
Of course this might sound a bit too much like actual work and not fun... but given the big fan scene for the closed source game Factorio, I would say it can be more fun that it looks at first ;)

Blackvoxel itself probably needs to be a bit more of a game instead of "just" a sandbox, but there is big promise in the overall concept, so give it a try :)

Project Leadership & Management in Free, Open Source Games

Both 0 A.D. and Unknown Horizons experience a change in leadership!

For 0 A.D., Erik Johansson steps down from project leadership and Michael D. Hafer assumes that role.

In Unknown Horizons, Nightraven steps back and Kilian fills the project management role.

Leadership in free and open source game projects is an exciting topic with much opinion about which style will lead to a successful game - whatever the subject's definition of "success" is - and too few examples to make objective statements about it.

Are you following any specific projects and their leadership structures an want to comment on these? I must admit that I am out of the loop with many, many projects, although I am pretty sure that for example Flare, NAEV and Valyria Tear have (successful) Benevolent Dictator for Life style leadership.

On related note: FIFE (the isometric 2d engine used by Unknown Horizons) moved to GitHub.

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

Various voxel engine ramblings

I have outed myself previously as not a big Minecraft fan, so take everything in this post with a grain of salt (as I obviously don't really understand that genre).

Anyways... recently this sub-reddit for open-source games was pointed out in our forums, and while it isn't really as lively as others (for example the Linux gaming one) it pointed out an new project called Iceball:

Pre-alpha Iceball screenshot

Seemingly made by people not happy with the recent commercialization of Ace of Spades, it's an all FOSS remake, those early development you can follow here (or on their Github page).

Now maybe the graphics are lacking on purpose (see disclaimer above), but I couldn't help to think: why for f***'s sake did they have to reinvent the wheel with their own engine instead of using for example Terasology:



Or Minetest, or the Ardorcraft API for that matter???

Ahh well, at least it made me aware that Terasology is still very much under development, and with its focus on DungeonKeeper & Dwarf-Fortress elements, it might actually become a game I would play (and doesn't make my eyes bleed :p ).

Speaking of which... the guy behind AgentKeeper released yet another nice video and graphics are constantly further improved as seen here.

Open Source Game Summer Screen Shorts 2012 #1

Knights, a top-down multiplayer quest/fighting game, received some GUI enhancements.

Tales of Gydia, a Liberated Pixel Cup fantasy turn-based RPG that focuses on UGC, was started on SourceForge.net.

Unknown Horizons, a historical city-building and economy RTS, received some new citizen building graphics from a first-time contributor.

Black Dog, an extremely atmospheric HTML5, fully-FOSS helicopter mini-game, got its (unfinished) Android port released.

Linus Torvalds not only showed his annoyance with Nvidia but also his love towards open source games in a recent talk (goto 58m20s).

ctdabomb, an active community member, converted and license-clarified the Art Museum SuperTuxKart racing track over the time span of about one and a half months, after asking the community for support.

SuperTux, a cute platformer, needs help finishing an animated owl sprite. To the left, you can see the current placeholder graphics.

FLARE, a hack'n'slash RPG engine and game, requested translations via email, pull request or forum post.

Terasology - YAMC or not?

YAMC? Yet another Minecraft clone??? Well Terasology (previously called "Moving Blocks") sure looks like one:

Terasology alpha gameplay

But besides looking like a pretty good YAMC, it actually promises to deviate from the boring Minecraft routine and mentions the pretty well liked games Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper as inspirations for its planned game-play :)

Code is under the Apache license, however the current pixel textures are non-free. But if this takes off, those should be relatively easy to replace with really free ones ;)
Oh and you can run it via Java directly from your browser (I had a black void as a world under Linux though... so your mileage might vary also).

Unknown Horizons Multiplayer Session March 10, 4:00 pm GMT

image: Unknown Horizon's multiplayer menu

There have been six updates on Unknown Horizon's blog this year alone and their latest is an invitation to a multiplayer gaming session.

Saturday, March 10, 16:00 GMT (convert to your time zone)

You will have to get and compile the development builds for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows but the guidelines are extensive and you can get real-time support via IRC, so don't let that intimidate you. :)

images: showing off Unknown Horizon's multiplayer chat

Whats happening in OpenDungeons?

Hello, I am one of the OpenDungeons (OD) developers and I wrote this blog post for FreeGamer.

I bet you're all very excited about whats been going on lately, and I can assure you that a lot of stuff have been made for OD. We have new music for you to enjoy while annihilating your foes, we've got new concept art for the Human and Undead faction, a new forge and a completely new tile set. We have also begun working on the AI and a XML specification for creature stats.

Music and trailer

Recently timong join the forum and asked about some musical tasks to perform. He started working on a main theme for the game and came up with this :) While he was at it he also made a nice trailer for us which you can find in the about page or watch it below:

New concept art

We have also received some very nice concept art from the OpenGameArt competition for the Undead faction we got art for these creepy characters:

• Necromancer
• Bone Golem

and for the Human faction we got art for these noble folks:

• Wisp
• Halfling
• Cleric
• Maiden

Code updates

Of changes to the code and features we have begun implementing a basic AI and making a XML specification for creature definitions, which should make life a lot easier for artists which want to try out their new model in game and for balancing the stats of each creature.

New tile set and forge

We also have new tile set made by Skorpio (although it is not in the game yet):

You can find more pictures of the new tile set in this forum thread.

Finally we also have a new forge to make devilish traps and impenetrable doors :)

Current tasks, problems and needed help

A new release is planned once a bug that is crashing the game is fixed. We are also looking for more people/help for the project, especially when it comes to coding. You can see more details about the crasher bug and what skills we need from new people here in this blog post.

Unknown Horizons 2011.3 Changes and Videolog

Unknown Horizons 2011.3 is out! Features are:

• Complete settlement AI (details here)
• Combat and diplomacy system
• Increase in performance (partially thanks to FIFE)
• Support for internationalized voices (right now available: de, en, fr)
• Nine new buildings, one new ship (here are some)
• New statistic widgets
• Usability and interface improvements (for example the in-game menu)
• New maps and a parameters-based map generator

The original announcement is here and some more details about the new features here.

[video: Unknown Horizons 2011.3 Changes (voiced)]

Development is active and they are on the lookout for people to help out or even join:

• 2D/3D/Animation artists can find some tasks here
• Naval public domain painting lovers can help by finding some background art
• Interested in mechanics/story? Share your ideas for catastrophes!
• Interesting screenshots and videos should be posted here
• Feedback is needed for this release. It can be shared on the forums or IRC room.

Translators, sound artists, programmers, game designers, writers and voice artists can also help. The get involved  page will let you know how to get started.

Pioneer and settler buildings



Shooting pirates



Translucent environment

[ More screenshots]

Summer Shorts 2 + Screens

Unknown Horizons Player Scores...

gscai of the real-time colony building simulation Unknown horizons wrote a short player-view summary of how the game's artificial intelligence works.

libtcod's project browser filter

libtcod, an advanced toolkit for roguelikes now has an online browser for projects using it that allows to apply filters.

Tactical battle in Hale

I stumbled over Hale, an RPG described as having "deep tactical combat system and storyline".

The project seems to use freely licensed assets, which is a great. I hope that the GUI will receive a makeover (using a pastel background color and killing the 1995'ish 3d button/border look does wonders).

Example sound visualization at Freesound 2.0

Freesound went 2.0! CC-BY and CC0 as license options! (Unfortunately CC-BY-NC as well). Sampling+ remains for legacy sounds where authors have not switched to a modern license. Read the announcement here.

Six-legged vehicle in Xonotic

Xonotic 0.5 brings new maps, vehicles and multi-language support. Many more details can be found in their annoucnement post.

News Shorts

OpenPatrician is a not-yet-playable free implementation in Java of Ascaron's classic The Patrician and The Patrician 2. There are some assets but unfortunately the project's default license is a noncommercial one.

OpenMW is moving forward: new blog look, renderer is being refractored, inventory being implemented, record saving too.

Alex the Allegator was part-ported to HTML5 using the melonJS library. I'm #9 on the high score at time of post! :D

DusteD, maker of Wizznic! is not dead.

Blendswap now has a slim set of rules for contributors and texture licenses are annoying.

Bandit Racer is a car racing and combat game in HTML5, built with GameJS. Comes with track editor and pretty UI. An earlier version multiplayer mode, which will probably come back sooner or later

Political Space Warfare

Political Space Warfare is an ambitious, multi faceted space based strategy in-progress game. Still far from achieving it's full vision, PSW wants to offer gameplay ranging from long-term strategy gameplay as seen in browser based empire building games such as Travian all the way down to a RPG where you play as a single unit in the greater picture.

Unfortunately, its Windows only at the moment, but the team are planning to port it to Linux/other platforms as soon as possible, which will be a lot sooner if there are any of you willing to help :)

PARPG

In a quick aside, PARPG is looking for a Lead Writer/ So if any of you are in the mood for writing some Post Apocaliptic fiction, be sure to have a look

Some more (L)GPL strategy game love

Ok, quick update before too much dust gathers around here ;)

Just yesterday I stumbled upon this gem of a strategy game over at LGDB:

They call that simple bot???

Its name is Quantum, as some of you might have guessed it is a clone of Dyson/Eufloria. But the game is quite mesmerizing with the strange background noise and your armies of small space tree spores conquering new worlds. But try it yourself!

Now normally clones are not as good as the original, right? Not is this case: Full multiplayer (with master-server and lobby), singleplayer skirmishes, in-game editor etc. are just a small part of the long feature list! Furthermore it's all available under the LGPL (written in Java). Me = happy puppy :)

Seven Kingdoms GPL version

Not exactly super fresh news but the relatively recently GPLed 1997's strategy game Seven Kingdoms got a SDL based Linux port. Check out a small video tutorial here (as I found it difficult understand what to do initially).

Oh, and lets not forget a game-play video

So that's all for today. Stay tuned for more awesome FOSS gaming news!

Non RTS strategy games

An update so quickly? Behold the Free Gamer world is coming to an end. :p


So, we mentioned some promising RTS games in the last update. OK, I forgot to mention Spring1944, but I am also a bit reluctant to mention Spring and its mods since it is such a pain in the backside to get it running correctly. :(


Back on topic... there a quite a few really great non RTS FOSS strategy games. I guess I don't really need to mention the classics to the typical reader of this blog, but Wesnoth, FreeCiv, FreeCol and UFO:AI are all very playable and good looking games! However there are others that get less attention and also some that show great promise!

Advanced strategic command

Advanced strategic command is one of those that gets relatively little news coverage, even though it is a really playable game. Granted, its graphics are pretty much the same as its big inspiration, the classic Battle Isle series, but that doesn't necessarily make them bad, right?

A new version was just released a few days ago, which finally also includes a tutorial for those new to this type of game.

Also interesting is the (German) Project: Battle Planets, which could be described as a MMOTBS based on ASC. It is not quite what you would expect from this description as most of the MMO part is done manually by human game moderators, which exchange ASC games states between players (sorry, it is a bit hard to explain exactly ;) ).

A similar game to ASC is Crimson Fields by the way, which has found its way to many mobile platforms.

Widelands

Another often neglected game is Widelands, which is obviously based on the classic game the Settlers (no not the Settlers of Catan, check Pioneers for that).

Widelands game play

The graphics could still be improved a bit, but it is shaping up to be a very faithful and fun re-implementation of that great classic game.

Unknown Horizons

While we are at FOSS re-implementations of great games... Unknown Horizons is continuing to become a Anno1602 clone of epic proportions. ;)

UH game play

It is not quite at the point where it could be described as a fully playable game yet, but you can expect it to become one relatively soon, I guess! (Another not quite playable but really promising game worth surely mentioning is FreeOrion by the way).

8Kingdoms

Last but not least, there is 8Kingdoms, which really is one of those games people don't even try after having a short glance at the screenshots. Yes, it's programmers art, albeit one that at least tried to hide it by having a plastic-like style for the figures. ;)

But if you actually try it, you will realize that even though it is a bit rough around the edges (why can't I set a custom wide-screen resolution :( ), the game play and the engine is already quite advanced.

What this game clearly needs is an artist taking over the graphical matters, and then this could quite quickly become one of those true FOSS strategy game gems!