Yeah, yeah, been quiet, will change, etc

Some people can organise themselves really well and accomplish everything they want to each day. Sadly that's not me!

However now my girlfriend is away for 2 months which means I have a lot of extra time. ;-)

OpenCity

Anyhow, OpenCity 0.0.5beta is available for download. It's not much of a game yet but is a promising start. Underwater schools aside, the user interface is quite nice, it seems solid enough, and the codebase looks like it is engineered with lots of original features. "Starting earthquake subsystem" is one of the impressive phrases to read when starting the game.

I also had a go at the latest Ghouls and Ghosts Remix release. Nostalgic! It's very good fun except for two things 1) it's insanely hard [or is that part of the fun?] and 2) the keys are not Linux friendly. Using alt/ctrl for jump/shoot and arrow keys for movement isn't a good idea when ctrl+alt combined with arrow keys tends to interact with your window manager (as with most modern distros). Oops.

I have more important things to talk about though. FreeArtSearch is a project by Ghoulsblade/Hagish (SFZ developers, FG forum hosts, among other things) to create a place where artwork for games is indexed all in a single place. It has automated tag clouds and lots of other features engineered towards making it easy to track down art relevant to your needs.

They also set up Planet FreeGameDev, a place where people's Free game development blogs are getting syndicated. Want your blog there? Post here or in the forums. Where those two get the time to set up all these things, make games (interesting SFZ information/videos in that link), and attend university, who knows!

Another Populus Remake

cspop

I wanted to mention it yesterday but held off... check out this post in the happy penguin forums effectively announcing a 3D RTS inspired by populus! Currently there is only an SVN repo and no official website but it looks like it's full of potential. I used to have high hopes for FreePop, a 2D populus clone, but sadly development fizzled out. This game - working title "cspop" - looks like it's actually further along in development than FreePop and is a much more exciting project. Whilst it looks a bit sparse, the author states (with grammar corrections):

Note I have been concentrating more on the logic to start with, so the look is still a bit cheesy, but that will be looked on soon also. Logic is close to finished though.

Random thought: I wish somebody would revive Emilia Pinball. I did suggest it as a GotM candidate at one point, but it didn't happen. Maybe when I've sorted out the FreeTrain stuff (*eyes look wearily up*) I'll focus on that.

FreeTrain

Speaking of FreeTrain, I registered a SF project. I just need to import SVN then make it build in MonoDevelop or VS2005. I'm waiting on some Japanese speaking help though since my Japanese extends to, "Konichiwa." Er, konichiwa!

There's another update to the Ghouls and Ghosts Remake! I like that game, although I wish the author would incorporate Scale2x and make it not so tiny. All that squinting hurts my eyes. :'(

So, todays music tip... Why have I decided to start giving music tips?

1. I love electro, dirty electro music and it's often not well known

2. Open source games often don't have sound so, well, durrr

3. Something else for me to ramble about, with a tenuous FOSS game link

Onto the tip:

Mark Romboy - The Club (Early)

Digging Deep

Well, well... my prayers are being answered. There is an open source Dungeon Keeper clone inspired game. Dungeon Digger has just 1 week ago had it's inaugral release. The author seems really eager (as happens during the inception of most OSS games) but the progress has been rapid enough to already attract a small community so hopefully it will reach a critical mass of developers if it gets enough attention.

Still there is a lot to do before it is a playable game but patience is a virtue. Thanks go to Ben Schram for pointing me in the direction of Dungeon Digger.

One game that I enjoyed toying with this week was the Ghouls & Ghosts Remake (that's a Freshmeat link on purpose). It brought back memories of nights spent sleeping over at friends houses as a kid and racing through Super Nintendo titles. However it is currently fiendishly hard. I'd like to see a bit of game balancing and also usage of Scale2x or another similar technique for improving the [resolution of the] graphics.

One last thing. The other day I mentioned a Geometry Wars clone, Xwars. By coincidence I came across another Geometry Wars clone, this time for Linux, called Grid Wars 2. On the website is the notice:

Sorry folks... I've had to remove the link to the download. Email from BizarreCreations:

"We're beginning to feel the effects of the Geometry Wars clones on our sales via Microsoft now and are beginning a process to begin to more robustly protect our copyright and intellectual property.

Therefore, I'd like to ask you in an amicable fashion to stop infringing our IP and pull the game 'Grid Wars' from the internet for download.

I hope you understand and are able to do this without us having to take further steps."

Grossly unfair. In other words, a corporation has made a simple enough game for a volunteer to copy and is objecting to the dent this volunteer creation is making in their sick profit margins. You know what, I fucking hate that. I respect commercial titles that have a lot of effort put into them, but if this is a precedent then it's going to threaten the position most FOSS games which are often inspired by a commercial title. And if people can clone a commercial title in their spare time, I do not respect that a significant effort (or at least a significant intelligent effort - get enough monkeys typing and you will rewrite the works of Shakespeare) has been put into that commercial title.

Here we have somebody reverse engineering a game - is that not what cloning a game is? - and he is muscled out by a company afraid that their cash cow is going to get creamed. The power of money. It outweighs the purpose of law.