Simple & Quick GPLed Java Tower Defense Game

image: github.com/godrin/TowerDefense screenshot

Just a simple, smooth and stable tower defense game by david kamphausen (godrin) & marc giersch (undermink).

Pro:

• Quite fast-paced, no boring waiting time.

Con:

• Drag-and-drop building placement sometimes fiddly.
• Effect of upgrades not clear.

video: github.com/godrin/TowerDefense gameplay

Download .jar: https://github.com/godrin/TowerDefense/downloads
Run via: java -jar defend-desktop-0.3.jar
Github: https://github.com/godrin/TowerDefense/

Get 0.A.D For Free! (Historical RTS Real Time Strategy Role Playing Strategy War Combat Game)

Popular cover boxes for 0 A.D. on eBay

0 A.D. is an epic free and open source real-time strategy game.

Download 0 A.D. For Free Here
Download for Mac OS X and Linux.

You don't have to pay for 0 A.D. These downloads are completely legal.

About this post

As explained in a recent news post by the 0 A.D. team, You Do Not Need to Buy 0 A.D. on eBay.

It would be ideal if the teams behind open source projects would have people working on selling the game in an ethical way that would support their work and the people working on the project.

Ethical would for example mean that it would be clearly stated that the game can be downloaded for free, what kind of physical box to expect (if at all, I remember that SuperTuxKart would often be sold as a "digital download" product) and laying out the distribution of income transparently. This would turn the purchase into a donation (whether that is an acceptable word to describe it needs to be checked with eBay terms) and there are likely to still be buyers that don't have the skills or time to read the text or double-check the freeware status of the game or only look at the screenshots.

Intergalactic news (new Red Eclipse version)

Somewhat related to the previous blog post (don't forget to vote to give a VR kit to the Cube2 developers), I can bring you the news that you can now download a new release (1.3 Galactic Edition) of Red Eclipse. By the words of the developers this is mostly a bugfix release:

This release sees a semi-stabilisation of the gameplay in favour of implementing a variety of bugfixes and user requests. We've removed some old cruft and implemented a few new game types to replace them, like coop (humans fight high powered bots), and king-of-the-hill (control and defend one flag). Due to the popularity of the impulse/parkour system we have introduced a new "impulse vaulting", where you can hold down your parkour key to "vault" over low obstacles, making it that much easier to navigate around busy levels.

But you can read up on the full changelog in the release thread on our forums. Oh and maybe you can help them out and create a new teaser video for their website?

On our forums I was also recently reminded of a Red Eclipse based mod called MekArcade (see more infos on their Moddb site), which as you can guess adds Mechs to the game.

Some MekArcade mechs

Information is otherwise relatively sparse (I couldn't find any word on their media license for example... but given RE's CC-By-SA licensing scheme I hope they sticked to the same), but they plan to release a first version relatively soon (Maybe they waited for the RE 1.3 release?).
The screenshots released so far look quite nice also and first released video gives off a Mechwarrior like vibe too, so I guess I am looking forward to their first release ;)

Vote to get Cube 2 devs a free virtual reality kit (Oculus Rift)!

Give Cube 2 some tech!

Vote here for Lee "eihrul" Salzman to receive an Oculus Rift for Cube 2 development!

Oculus Rift is the much lauded VR headset that was Kickstarted recently, making almost 10 times the initial goal in pledges. Unfortunately, it isn't an open project, however, one of the big names in FOSS game dev, Lee "eihrul" Salzman has been nominated to receive a Rift dev kit in a giveaway competition, hosted by Oculus.

Eihrul is the lead developer of the Cube2 "Sauerbraten" engine, that has had implementations other interesting technologies such as the "3rd Space" force feedback vest implemented, making Cube2 an excellent project to provide Rift support.

Vote for him here

OpenMW 0.17.0: Changes and Freedom(!?)

video: OpenMW v. 0.17.0 Commentary

The OpenMW engine re-implementation for proprietary RPG classic Morrowind brings fixes, a pause menu, camera modes and proper player control, potion usage, drain/fortify dynamic stats/attributes magic effects and other changes in release 0.17.0.


Work has also begun on an Editor and The Example Suite.

A Free-as-in-Freedom OpenMW game?

The Example Suite is going to be a small standalone game that does not contain any Bethesda owned art assets. Therefore, even those who do not own Morrowind will be able to play with OpenMW and test it.

The project uses the "Release early and often" mantra and so hopefully we will have an early build available for download soon.

If you can help with; skills in animating, music, sounds, modeling or are an experience modder please visit The Example Suite forum.

An editor for OpenMW!

The OpenMW Editor is necessary in order to implement the post 1.0 features that the original Morrowind engine isn't capable of. It's currently a one man project and he could use some help. Visit the OpenMW Editor forum.

Additional links:

• OpenMW Homepage
• Download
• Roadmap

Unvanquished development news

I have to apologize for the recent lack in FG updates, but at least *I* have a good excuse as first my Internet broke down, and now I am preparing to relocate to another continent (extra points for guessing which in the comments ;) ).

Anyways... it seems like there is now a "winner" out of the total breakdown and split-up of the efforts to revitalize Tremulous earlier this year. I will not go into details, but I can assure you it was not pretty, and I decided to skip any news coverage on it until the dust had settled.
I hope this is now the case, and for now it seems only one of the projects really shows some progress... that is unless the other is not working in stealth mode.

Lets see... at least Unvanquished is actually releasing alphas of their game, so I am leaning toward them when it comes to which will actually become a nice, playable game soon.

You can follow development quite well on one of the team-member's blog here. In the most recent post, some nice screenshots surfaced, and both their new modeling, GUI and animation work seems quite nice too.

Unvanquished: Human base preparing for an attack

Anyways, check out the other cool news from them, and maybe try one of their recent alphas... however don't expect a fully refurbished Tremulous yet.

Also out of Beta: Annex:CTW Release 3

We are a bit late to the party (partially due to my current German Telekom induced Internet abstinence at home :( ), but last month the first stable release of Annex: Conquer the World was released.




For those out of the loop: Annex is a so called total conversion mod (albeit standalone) of Megaglest. You can read up on its development and the latest news in their forum post on the MG forums.

Flight of the Maxima 0.4 (Lin/Win Roguelike/RPG)

Image: A kitchen in TFM

The Flight of the Maxima (TFM) is an unlikely fusion of Sci-fi, dark comedy and medieval Christianity.

It is a free roaming roleplaying computer game where you can explore vast lands, talk to an extremely diverse amount of people, and do a lot of crazy things that certainly sounded like a good idea at the time.

There's also a central story element that begins with you suddenly finding yourself a long way from home and dealing with… well let's not spoil things just yet.

The game can run on Linux and Windows, is intended to run on Mac (untested as of late), and both the games code and it's assets are Open Source (BSD), which means you can modify and redistribute the game nearly any way you want.

The game compiles fine for example on Arch Linux 64bit (with these hints). One license problem is the use of non-free FMOD but if I understand correctly, that dependency is optional.

Video: First steps in TFM 0.4