Great changes upcoming for UFO:AI

One of the FOSS projects I really hold dear (mainly because they chose to include a few models made by myself :p ) is UFO:AI.
For those totally out of the loop: it's a turn based strategy game based on the classic game X-Com utilizing an improved Quake2 engine.

Recently they had a new release, version 2.4, but the changes upcoming are even cooler (new soldier models and a greatly improved GUI):

More cool screens of those upcoming changes can be found here and here. And here you can find some more as part of a slightly older, but still interesting interview with the developers.

Besides these development news, there seems to have been an informal competition of who can do the nicer Let's Play videos of UFO:AI ;)

FrontFox's UFO:AI Let's Play video part1

Click here for Part 2 and Part 3, or check out this series of Let's Play videos as the alternative: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (Part 1 starts out with an outdated version though).

So if you are hooked now by this awesome game, you might as well check out some alternatives: OpenXcom and XenoWar. Neither of which has as much polish and nice graphics as UFO:AI however.

Wizznic! Puzzle Perfection Progress

Wizznic! cursor-driven level editor WIP

Keyboard, mouse and touchscreens control the prettier-than-ever, polished retro puzzle Wizznic!, which is 100% GPLv3 and available as a GitHub project.

• Last release (0.9.9): ~six months ago.
• Last commit: one day ago.

A recent progress update post reveals the goals for and the path to 1.0:

Before Wizznic 1.0 we will create two completely new themes, each for it's own pack, thus, two completely new packs! That is 40 new puzzles, leaving the mainline puzzle set at 80 puzzles.
However, before doing that, we will sit down and play through the entire game, this should allow us to come up with some really evil puzzles for the later levels ;)
Anyway, just wanted to say, in this in-browser, Object Oriented, Accelerated, flashy, highres, 3D world, that little pixel pushing Wizznic is not dead!

Quoted from "Wizznic work", 2012-06-05.

0 A.D. Audio interview and special effects

The premier FOSS RTS 0 A.D. has recently won (by an incredible small margin) the Sourceforge.net project of the month vote and now they have done a cool audio interview:

Rich: Do you have much interaction or collaboration with any of the other Open Source gaming communities?
Aviv: We’re kind of in the middle between the Indie game world and the Open Source software world. We don’t quite belong to either culture entirely. We certainly invite more projects to reach out. Perhaps we can find new ways to collaborate. We do believe that a large part of the code that we developed can be used for other projects. But at the moment we’re more focused on developing 0 A.D. to completion, and writing a lot of code and implementing a lot of features that are specific to 0 A.D., than implementing general solutions for all sorts of games.

Click here for the transkript of the full interview, but if you are to lazy to read you can also listen to it on that page in the original voices of the developers.

Besides this, they have recently implemented a lot of cool new graphical effects (I guess you could call it JUICE ;) ):

Distance fog and other new effects

For more nice screenshots of these effects, have a look at this post on their forums.

Liberate some crazy games

So I guess we are a little late to the show, but you should still have a few hours left to pledge money towards the liberation of all games (and more) done by a guy that goes by the name Bryan Lunduke.

Amongst the games is the crazy Linux Tycoon in which you can roll your own OS:

And other such niche titles, but there seem to be some good tools in the deal too.
IHMO this seems to be rather an experiment, and the guy is promising to refund the money if he doesn't reach the goal of US $4000 by today (Yeah I said we are late, and I have no good excuse as it was posted a few days ago in our forums :-/ ).

So far he has gotten a bit more then half of it, so maybe it's still possible to reach the goal. However I guess the time was just a bit too short, and the games offered also a bit too not mainstream for this to really have a chance.

Edit: He extended the deadline until Friday, as the goal is almost reached.

Liberated Pixel Cup is a go!

This weekend the Liberated Pixel Cup started its art contest, which will run until the 30th of June. You can check out the style guide and the existing assets here (includes a interactive HTML5 demo).

Reasonable prizes for the winners and runner-ups might motivate you to contribute, but judging will be only after the second phase of game prototyping, which ends on July 31st.

But even if you don't win, you can be sure that your contributions will be a very valuable part of the resulting FOSS game content pack, so every small addition counts.

Good luck!