Best Open Source Top-Down Space Shooter : Super Space Invader

Lasers, rockets, shields, health regeneration, pixels. You know. The good stuff. Just nicely packaged with levels of just the right duration and hardness, persistent upgrades, shaders, reverb...

Two buttons are enough to play, since that was one of the themes of Ludum Dare #34, in which the game came #74 among 1638 jam entries.

Super Space Invader Review

Supser Space Invader was made with LÖVE (v0.9) and thus runs on Linux, OS X, Windows.

The source is available on GitHub under zlib/libpng.

Mini Sci-Fi Open Source Tower Defense Game

Purely by chance, I found an obviously abandoned but still fun to play mini tower defense with a skippable tutorial level and two playable missions, beautiful graphics and performance settings.

To be a master is to spam en mass

So you place towers and the shoot enemies that move towards your base. I know this! Being an impatient player type, I skipped past the tutorial and was annihilated in level 1.

Short enough messages in a hard enough tutorial level

The degree of my destruction was such, that I was thankful for the tutorial being there at all. Even though I did die in it, it taught me enough about the all-or-nothing early game (which some might refer as to "unbalanced") to get my strategy right.

Turn off for speed. Turn on for awesome!

You get 3 towers: that allows you to build more tower, one that allows you to shoot more and one that shoots. You can block paths and create mazes. There are no tower upgrades and that's okay.

All the plot. Space to continue. Take that non-skip-able intro video AAA games!

Mission #3 is not possible to win (prove me wrong) but it was a great experience to find that I was able to beat the tutorial mission after all. By deviating from the given instructions! If that's not freedom (besides being open source) then I don't know what is!

Yeah right...

Come to think of it, the ridiculousness of level 3 practically speaks "dear player, you should totally fork and make new levels!"

Made with love2d

The last commit to Turres Monacorum was in May 2014 and the game was made at a game jam. My experience dictates that this won't be picked up by the original developers any more but to any player with love2d installed, it will come as a wonderful, visually polished snack!

Love2D Tower Defense: Turres Monacorum

Download the mini tower defense game from the github release page and enjoy!

LÖVE game programming course for kids/teens in Kansas City (August 2012)

There will be a Lua game programming class for kids and teens in Kansas City by indie game developer Rachel Morris some time in August 2012.

LÖVE 2D game engine and Tiled Map Editor will be used. Both are open source and run perfectly fine on Linux systems.

Rachel is known for OpenArt and you can check out an interview with her or her GitHub repositories.

video: Beginning Programming guide - Need newbies

Feedback on the existing course materials and of course participants are requested.

GunFu Deadlands 1.01: Performance Up!

GunFu Deadlands title screen

GunFu Deadlands, a quick, atmospheric retro keys+mouse top-down shooter for Win/Osx/Lin has been updated (1.01) to run with LÖVE 0.7.2 and the development codebase moved from Subversion to Git.

The game plays perfectly fine on a ASUS EeePC 1000H netbook running Arch Linux 32bit. A previous version (don't remember which) was extremely slowly. I can't tell whether the playable speed is thanks to improvements of GFD, love2d or perhaps the drivers for my netbook but if you've had performance trouble with the game in the past, try again!

Note: if you get shot in the title screen and start the game before respawning, you will be able to walk through walls.

This is the first update of GunFu Deadlands since the 1.0 release 22 months ago.

Video: GunFu Deadlands 1.01 gameplay

By the way, did you know that GunFu Deadlands is one of the 250 Indie Games You Must Play?

PS: I got word from the developer about the performance increase:

Just for your interest, I made some measurements and it seems that the speed increase is indeed dramatic: 55% faster.

I computed the mean FPS rate by measuring the time it takes to render 1000 frames in-game and dividing 1000 by this number. The formula (FPS_faster_version - FPS_slower_version) / FPS_slower_version is what produced this 55%.

Simple & Polished

 Avoision

 Falling Block Game 2

Avoision is a simple collect-dots-avoid-blocks game.

Falling Block Game 2 is a Tetris clone.

Both are simple games. Both are very polished! I avoided them at first, assuming they would be of the yet-another-hello-world-game type but luckily got over that arrogant moment. :)

Neither forces full-screen, they scale to any resolution, controls are crystal clear and feedback is great.

Both games use Radius Engine, which is a Win/Lin OpenGL/SDL/Lua engine. Kind of like LÖVE.

For Arch Linux users: I made AUR packages for Radius Engine, Avoision and FBG2. I use clyde for managing packages.

PS: Sometimes polish is worth more than complexity. Can you name free open source games that are polished to the max?

Quoting releases: Bitfighter, Love2d, OpenClonk

Bitfighter

There's a new version of the retro-style multiplayer top-down action game Bitfighter and a well-readable changelog:

This version features new Soccer rules, and a verified user name system protected by your forums password. Many other improvements, including important stability fixes and enhancements for all platforms.

love2d 0.7 no-game-screen

LÖVE 0.7 "Game Slave" has finally been released! This is a Lua 2D game engine also known as "love2d". Oh, and it's on Indie DB. Oh, and Indie DB allows to sort engines by license!

Framebuffers, for rendering to places other than the screen. Threads, for true multithreaded programming. New callbacks, like love.quit and love.focus. A text-origin change from lower- to upper-left. And about a million different bugs have been squashed!

You'll find games and toys and demos to try out in this forum and you can give my stupid little game a try too.

"The Guardians of Windmills" OpenClonk scenario

OpenClonk 1.0 hass been released and I just noticed that I love how their main page contains all the info important to people who don't know the project.

This milestone focuses on some fast paced melees, races and a few experimental scenarios to choose from. All scenarios are meant to be played multiplayer through the internet. It features completely new controls, a new HUD and many weapons and tools to choose from. Also included are four tutorials that guide new players and veteran clonkers through the new controls.

I feel like giving OpenClonk a try soon and hope the tutorials are any good. Here's a game description, if you never took a closer look at the project like me.

OpenClonk is a free multiplayer action game where you control clonks, small but witty and nimble humanoid beings. The game is mainly about mining, settling and fast-paced melees. OpenClonk is also not just a game but also a versatile 2D game engine that offers countless possibilites to make your own mods.

Warzone 2100 Liberation Day 2008 & Interview

Happy Warzone 2100 Liberation Day! Four years ago Eidos released Warzone 2100 under the GPL (see this announcement).

Warzone 2100 GUI proposal

There has been more progress with the new texturing system, but also a GUI system is in the works (both a library called betawidget and an interface proposal) which looks quite impressive compared to the current look. And hopefully the feel will improve too - there are some small unergonomicalities with how assembling tanks currently works.

Warzone 2100 GUI proposal also

Also read this interview if you want to know more about betawidget (it has SVG support!) and future plans for the project. There's also a German translation available.

The WZ wiki has now a page that explains how people can contribute to improving the wiki. For all the MediaWiki-fetishists out here.

Speaking of MediaWiki and fetishism, there's now a LÖVE wiki. Let's see and hope it brings much use!

Uzebox

Behold! The Uzebox!

Uzebox is a retro and minimal game console, which supposedly will have an open architecture, driver and game soon. It is built for NES controllers and it's driver is written for NTSC. Take a look at this video to witness it's capabilities!

PURITY

It's now possible to play PURITY with pre-compiled maps! See this thread for instructions. Currently there is half a dozen of maps, on which you can roll around and figure out what the different attacks do. I found experimenting with the weapons very interesting and already developed some techniques for "get as fast as possible from this part of the map to that other part of the map."

Also, if you're into minimalistic art, you'll find PURITY to be a tool for creating some sexy screenshots. Hm... three dee canvas...

Radakan's team decided to use the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license for all of it's content. What joy! I'm still waiting for WorldTool's next release. Impatiently.

I just red that Nosslak, who contributed to OpenFrag before, offered his skill to the Radakan project. His motivation seems to be the slow progression of OpenFrag.

Did you know you can learn to create a game showing a picture of cheese in under five minutes? It's true! True, I tell you!

Also, I'm trying to create a snake-like game in Lua. I've been thinking about the concept in the last four days, but I have some kind of mental blockade which keeps me from sitting down and keep on writing these less than a hundred lines of code.

Commander Stalin

PS: Commander Stalin is a Bos Wars-based RTS with a ww2 theme. The music in the game is screaming "copyright infringement" - I wonder about the artwork.

Back from dusmania, right to RubyWeekend...

Surt's goblin

Surt contributed the first model to OpenDungeons (and it looks good!) The model also was quickly incorporated by Timong into jClassicRPG.

Meanwhile, JackyJ (creator of the cool 3D platform-marble and physics game irrlamb) released the first version of Choria, which seems to be a parody of MMORPGs. It reminds me of the funny (though unfree) Progress Quest.

Word War vi has reached release 0.19! Controls are fine now and the side-scrolling arcade is lots of fun to play. It might be the first game with Xbox 360 controller rumble effects on Linux!

RubyWeekend #2 is happening this weekend. I'll be helping kiba with art stuffs. It's gonna be fuun! As you might have figured, the rules are to use ruby inside the time span of the weekend to create a game. :)

The 3D Ultima Online client remake Iris 2 scored first price (best project) at dusmania (german indie games ...party :) ).

lalalove at dusmania

Part of the dusmania was a overnight games creation competition. Our result (made with LÖVE) is lalalove (working title), a game inspired by Lost Garden's Celestial Music. Basically you connect stars, asteroids and planets, to create musical compositions. The current state isn't polished but playable and fun for some seconds. We're definitely going to make it kick ass!

Also: No more game videos on Vimeo allowed. Not sure if they permit videos of games you did yourself.

Apricot ripens, NO just is and Warsow wants $

Winning a game of NO

NO is a fun little puzzle game [video]. It is built on top of LÖVE, which is fairly easy to have for Win and Lin users. Mac builders wanted!

I found a list of open source games for the Mobile Edition of Java. About 25 puzzle/arcade titles, mostly GPL'ed.

The Apricot project is ripening with great speed! Further additions to blender have been made and videos of a playable prototype recorded and uploaded. The plan to unleash "real Open Source power" by opening Apricot's code repository has unfortunately not been fulfilled yet.

The opinion exists, that a game will be less fun for people who were able to play a development version of it. I don't think this problem is a big one and believe that simply because of the necessity for compiling, most people will wait for an official release.

An example of a story-based single-player game with an open Subversion repository is Rastullahs Lockenpracht, a TDE-based 3D RPG. I haven't tried it so far because the last time it caught my attention, compiling code was a large burden for me. Now I won't try it as it appears to be depending on non-free Nvidia and Fmod libraries.

Apricot: Crystal Space Preview #1

It seems that the Apricot team has the same problems that I have when recording with recordMyDesktop: The recorded field doesn't fit the selected window, which results in capturing of unwanted space above and below the targeted window.

Warsow's developers started accepting donations. They want to use it for making participation in an own LAN party cheaper. I'm becoming more and more uncertain about the ultimate goal of the project. Is it profit? A fun game? An elitist community? Being popular? PS: What I'm talking about here is the "ultimate master plan" - which I'm certain every open source project secretly has. ;)

CivCool, TremFuture, WineOne, WarzoneFree

If you have had problems viewing this blog via Internet Explorer, you should not have these problems any more. Many thanks to intelperfectionist for pointing out that css-related issue that we had!

FreeCiv, it's sooo pretty (you knew that already, I know...)

I recently learned to enjoy FreeCiv very much. It's pretty and fun. It also has a (fairly) new release called Mr. 2.1.5.

FreeCol 0.7.4 has been released.

Tremulous 1.2? Visit this page to read how you can help making the next release a reality. By playing!

The latest version of LÖVE is now 0.3.1 and a bugfix is coming soon. I can now say with complete confidence that this yet another project is an awesome one. It has style. Check out their forum community. These guys are cool. As you easily can tell, I'm still blinded by LÖVE's stylishness. Oh. And here is a terrible video of some engine demos!

OpenFracas (0.5) now has music and sound.

After 15 years of development, Wine reached version 1.0. Wine is not a windows emulator.

Remember Mars - Land of No Mercy? I at least twice mourned it's death. It seems that the game likes to revive a lot. Animations seem to be the aim at the moment.

Little video showing off what the engine can do right now

PS!!!: Warzone 2100's music and videos are now licensed under the GPL! I am so excited! Warzone 2100 is a great game that long ago was a proprietary one. The real-time strategy game is much fun, though I felt that long gameplay was dull without music and that the story wasn't very touchable without videos. Joy!!! I also discovered the Warzone 2200 project. It appears to be aiming for improving the game engine.

News salad

In case you're one of those who use youtube as a music player, now you can use it to listen to Wesnoth music.

The one-year-old, made-for-university, one-man game project Heroes of Wesnoth has a new release. There's not much to see yet and it's not the first and certainly not the last HoMM clone but I wish it the best of luck. Whatever it will turn out to be, at least it will have great Battle for Wesnoth art. :)

Last post I told you about Ardentryst. There's a mute gameplay video, I recommend you to take a look at what the game is like as I see some freshness in it.

Bear Factory

A new version of the young platform game Plee The Bear has been released. The code has been cleaned and some images were added. It also features the new level editor called "Bear Factory". The next release has been promised for end of June. I think the level editor will make this project much more interesting, especially for game developers of other platform games.

l-echo, an open source clone of the abstract puzzle game Echochrome, is now 0.1.0 versions old. I haven't given it a try yet. I will. Because it does look very nifty.

tank simulator game

The 1000 USD expensive tank simulator game is stuck at 52.8% of it's financial goal. I think sooner or later some generous comrades will throw their pennies in.

No sign of apricot opening it's repository yet, but in a recent video some features of apricot's blender branch are shown off: object snapping and shadow map baking. These improvements are supposed to ease game/level-design and are likely to find their way into the main blender branch sooner or later. You can get pre-built blender builds of all kinds and colors on GraphicAll.

There's also this YA2DGE LÖVE. What is impressive about it is the homepage's look and it's realistic roadmap. A clean look and decent sense of humor sure are a good way to catch my attention. LÖVE made me find Face Me and Scream. Thanks, LÖVE.

Oh by the way, have you noticed the blog's new look? :) Let us know what you think.

"We already got headless lizards"

PS: (How could I forget?) jClassicalRPG has had it's first birthday! Paul aka Timong delivered a grand speech! (Worth reading!) The project is in "urgent need of 3d Mythic Monsters!!" though!

I also want to thank everyone posting to our game announcements forum! I wasn't expecting to provide news for more than 3-5 games today but then took a second look in said location..

PPS: OpenArena 0.7.7 for hardcore bug fixing is in the house!

PeeEss: Charlie just mentioned that I forgot to serve the news of Glest's new website and new 3.2 alpha 1 patch, which finally features scripted maps aka missions! Yehaw!