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!

Ascii 3D

Tower

New VS Models :-)

Tower - a rogue-like with a difference. The art is ascii, but it's rendered in 3D. Interesting...

The devblog for Vega Strike is full of activity. People are sorting out new artwork, replacing the frail sound server, and implementing lots of other improvements to the game. It seems that school is oout and summer is in, so the developers are rallying to make a superb new release of VS a reality in the next month or two.

The up and coming space game Stress Free Zone is seeing lots of development activity. They are working on implementing the ability to walk around your ship. Since your ship is modular this involves generating the ship internals as well as just modelling them. Whilst a lot of the art is placeholder work, the concepts are really cool and I can't wait for that game to get a few more features, a bigger community, and blossom into the awesome game it's threatening to become. I really like the ideas behind SFZ - like reducing things such as trading grind and focusing on keeping the gameplay interesting and fun.

Over at happypenguin.org (which I can barely reach at the moment) they are running a poll about the demise of the platformer. They should check out SauerMod that, among other things, turns Sauerbraten into a platform game. "Other things" includes AI bots, kart racing, and other enhancements to Sauer. Speaking of Sauerbraten, it looks rather lovely these days, as evidenced by this trailer:

Sauerbraten Trailer

A few people commented that they prefer other video hosts to YouTube. Well the choice of video host is not mine - it's up to people who post videos for their games, and I'm not going to be downloading and reuploading gameplay videos every time I want to embed one here so it's hobson's choice there. However I will try and link them each time from no onwards as well as just embedding them. Thanks for the handy feedback! :-)

It's The Future, Stupid

I wasn't going to post today 'cos I'm busy, but I can't resist...

There's an update on the combat plans for space game SFZ, as well as new screenshots. Direct from the DevBlog:

After experimenting a bit we decided against making sfz combat based on fast reaction time and dogfight navigation, which quickly leads to frustrating "where is the enemy" problems. Instead weapons won't have to be aimed manually, they'll work like turrets, and if the enemy is in range you will be able to hit him without effort.



The deciding factor in combat will be stuff like weapon ranges and strengths and weaknesses of different weapons against different shield-types, homing missiles and counter-measures, maybe also a bit of energy management. This makes positioning, tactics and equipment a more interesting component.

I can't stress how much I agree with this. Think about it, it's set in the future. Auto-tracking should be a given. Surely space combat will be about decision making not faster-than-light reactions, so it's nice to see they are emphasising this and reducing the efforts required to target enemy ships.

Anyway, they still have a long way to go but it's nice to see well considered design decisions early on and, if they can get some models the quality of those frequently contributed to Vega Strike, they will have a very good game indeed if they can execute their plans.

No sooner had I posted about 8 Kingdoms yesterday, than somebody commented with a link to a Ubuntu .deb they had created, so have a go. I did, although it did not hold my attention for too long (it's late, I'm busy, etc) but it looked good from what little I saw of it. Not quite my style of game - seems much more rooted in table top war games than I like - but should definitely interest quite a few stategy fans.

Not game specific, but this online book on producing open source software is a very good resource for anybody running an open source project. Developers should check it out.

Another good resource, for open source friendly licensed music, is Jamendo.com so anybody looking for music for their game might want to check that out.

High Contrast

Gamma Low is an interesting new multiplayer RTS project. Players act in teams in some kind of light oriented battle. It is very early in the project and the only worthwhile information seems to be in their roadmap, but it's an intriguing concept nonetheless.

Hex-a-pop is an original and well implemented puzzle game with cute graphics. Once you get your head around the basic techniques used to consume common hex patterns, it's pretty easy, but I think it's a good game for spatially challenging a younger audience. And it's open source and available for most operating systems.

Open City

There's a new Open City screenshot, seen here on the right. How cool is that starting to look, eh? New release soon? Fingers crossed.

I mentioned the space sim Stress Free Zone for the first time a few weeks ago, a space combat game which aims to have cooperative multiplayer gameplay (e.g. defending space stations) as well as modular ships among other features. They are making good progress too, which can be seen on their development blog.

And last but not least Windstille 0.3.0 is out in the wild. A platform game in the style of the classic Turrican series, the game now boasts 3D characters running around an artistic 2D world. Currently it is only distributed in source format but is still only more of a tech demo than a game. It is hard to find any screenshots but I have seen it in action and it looks really nice.

I'm sure there's more but my brain is in "off mode". I still did not get Privateer Gemini Gold 1.02rc1 running (well, it runs, just without sound) on my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn laptop although I did help one of the main developers fix a few setup issues. Did anybody else have more success?