Here is another post about a project I found in the far ends of the internet ("here be dragons"), but which seems really promising never the less.
But first of all a disclamer by the original creator:
The screenshots you are about to see are not yet an eye candy, they're rather to be seen as a 'proof of concept' with lots of crappy placeholders. Work so far has mainly been done on the internal mechanics of game handling such as object interaction (player can carry gun which again can 'carry' a mag and the like), realistic calculation of trajectories, hit testing etc.
So what am I talking about? A (most likely) open-source Operation Flashpoint type of game running on the Irrlicht engine with the current working title OpenFlashpoint:
All there is so far is a thread on the Irrlich forums (with a few more details and development screenshots) and sadly the main developer seems to be bogged down by "real-life" ATM. But it seems like a worthwhile project to support.
Oh and get this: it is developed primarily for Linux :D
2x0ng is a challenging action/puzzle game with procedurally generated levels. It is pronounced "TWO-zong", and is the sequel to David O'Toole's 2009 PC puzzler Xong.
2x0ng framebuffer examples
At its core, this game is a mashup. 2x0ng's design is a nonlinear combination of several different late 70s/early 80s home video games, combining related aspects of each into something new. In 2x0ng, you move a guy around the screen and shoot at enemies in all directions, as in Berzerk. The ball you throw ricochets and comes back to you, like in Tron Deadly Discs. You break colored bricks with the ball, like in Breakout. You transfer colors from one place to another in order to complete the level, similar to Revenge Of The Beefsteak Tomatoes.
To reach the next level, you must successively unlock new areas by opening color-coded gates in the correct order. The levels are procedurally generated, so the game experience is different each time. Later levels are much larger than the screen, and feature substantially more moving/colliding objects than would have been possible in a real home video game from that era.
Vanity items and improved colours: dress up and frag with style.
Visible legs in first person: know where you are kicking and parkouring.
New and revamped maps: bringing you even more variety.
Better viewing: level flythroughs, improved third and first person cameras.
Better menus and other HUD elements: easier to see and read at a glance.
New weapon: Mines add a new dimension to the existing gameplay.
New mode: attack and defend in Gauntlet, competing for the most laps.
Automatic demo recording: for those times you just have to watch it again.
User Accounts: donate or contribute, and wear the in-game supporter badge.
Improved weapon balance and gameplay rules, bugs fixed, and much more.
Especially the visible legs in 1st person view add to the parcour movements and overall the game feels much more "complete" now. Here are some impressions of a bot-match I had earlier on:
Are We Alone - a space game where you travel from planet to planet, between star systems in search of intelligent life - has been released on Github under MIT license.
It was made for Ludum Dare 22 "alone" and is a quite atmospheric piece.
In the genre mix between MMORTS, city building, economy simulation and tower defense game, you control an exiled human, with the apparent goal to get back to earth.
The interaction with other players is quite indirect. You can attack other player's bases and win the "data" resource this way, which you need to perform "research" actions. However, defeating a base does not change it, you simply get the reward and can attack again.
Shunned Survivor Server map
While researching, however, you need to perform in a tower defense minigame, during which your defensive towers can be destroyed. If you succeed, the research was successful. If not, you have to enforce your defenses and try again.
Even though quite a bit of the gameplay time is spent on waiting for resources to be generated by the various resource gathering buildings, I find this game very entertaining and highly recommend you to give it a try.
Erebus is a hack & slash role-playing game under heavy development, yet playable with currently three missions.
Features:
Classic point-n-click style RPG, with dungeons to explore, enemies to fight, NPCs to talk to, sub-quests to complete, scenery to interact with, weapons, treasure and other items to find.
Also supports Rogue-like keyboard controls.
Multiple quests (currently three, more will be added as development progresses!)
Choice of starting characters (currently Barbarian, Elf, Halfling, Ranger, Warrior).
Start straight into the action - none of this "For your first quest, please find your next door neighbour's pet cat".
Vector-based world rather than tile-based - so items/scenery can be placed in any position, or aligned in any direction.
2D animated graphics, with zoom in/out, and lighting effects.
Completely free and Open Source - no ads, unlike many free Android apps.
User interface optimised to work with mouse, keyboard and/or touchscreen.
Cross-platform - available for Windows, Linux, Nokia Symbian and Android devices.
Code License:GPLv3+ Content License: Various (Most DFSG approved, CC-BY 2.x might be problematic)
A few day ago a much improved version of the 4X space strategy game FreeOrion was released. Check out this cool set of introduction videos (Part 1, 2, 3):
Most notable additons:
Very much improved, non-cheating AI. Sometimes experienced 4X players loose.
Many GUI enhancements and shortcuts.
Galactopedia expanded with game mechanics articles and many cross-links.
Batch production of ships now possible.
Improved sitrep notifications
Reworked stealth and detection
Almost everything has been enhanced, reworked, and better balanced.
I guess I should take a few paragraphs on this article to explain my stance on crowd-funded game projects. I've always been turned off by most Kickstarter game projects for a very simple reason: after personally inquiring a plethora of developers on their stance for Open-Source and Free Software, I was generally met with negative replies, half-baked excuses, bitter retorts or complete silence.
Now, although I recognize it is every developer's right to pick the license and the conditions for the usage of their own work, it strikes me as a very odd attitude for people engaging into crowd funding projects to be so unwilling to provide any other warranties to their prospective backers and future customers other than “we will make this happen if you give us enough money”. From this point, let's make something clear: pledging on a crowd-funded game project isn't exactly the same thing as buying a video game. From the backers' part it's an investment and a risk. It's about depositing your faith on other peoples' words, in hopes they will eventually deliver what they promised. When you buy a game, be it good or bad, you at least know that you're dealing with a finished product. When you pledge on a crowd-funded project, completion is only a possibility regardless of the campaign's success.
So, in my personal opinion, I've always thought crowd-funded game projects should strive to provide the level of trust they request from their backers. In this case, that means allowing people to have access to the game's source code under a permissive / Free Software license, preferably starting right at the end of the campaign. Why? Simply because that allows for a tighter control of what's going on in the development backstage, and will allow every contributor to provide better feedback on the work being done. Raw engine code also gives backers something that can eventually be picked up and used for other personal purposes, if the project happens to fail for some reason.
With that said, let's talk a little about this project, which is, after all, what lead me to write this post. Asylum is the brainchild of Agustin Cordes, the Argentinian developer behind Scratches, a horror game that managed to get some degree of attention way back in 2006. The project aims to create a Lovecraftian-inspired horror point-and-click adventure game that will focus on an intense and immersive atmosphere, followed closely by engaging storytelling. From the trailer and screenshots provided so far, it seems like a rather professional endeavour, but for me the most pleasant surprise, was that the developer's in-house engine, Dagon, will be Free and Open-Source. On top of that, Cordes himself actually took the time to explain why he believes the engine should be free, and how such a decision aims not only to help preserve Asylum for future generations, but also to empower other indie developers by providing an open platform anyone will be free to use.
Since there is no information available about specific licensing on the project page, I actually went on to ask the developer about which specific license was being used for the Dagon engine:
Me: Hello. I have one question regarding Dagon. You already stated it's going to be free and open source, but exactly under which software license are you going to release it? Agustin Cordes: Hi! We're currently using CDDL but I'm expecting to re-license with the more popular MPL 2.0 very soon. Cheers! Me: Fair enough. Do I have your permission to quote this conversation in a news blog about Free Software gaming? Agustin Cordes: Absolutely! :)
“MPL” referring of course to the Mozilla Public License, which despite not being a strong copyleft license, it is both Free Software and GPL compatible. So perhaps Dagon can motivate a new generation of graphic adventure lovers to innovate upon the work started by Asylum. We can only hope future Kickstarter projects and indie developers adopt a similar perspective on Open-Source development.
With little less than a few days to go (I'm ashamed to say I only heard about this project very recently), Asylum is already fully funded, but if you still wish to contribute to this genuinely FLOSS project, or simply purchase the game for a special price, you still have a chance. Extra funding goals have already been set, and some additional rewards may also seem worthy to you.
The source for Asylum's engine, Dagon, can already be found here, currently licensed under CDDL (Thanks to Evropi for pointing this out).
Physica is a very simple casual platformer game where the goal is to drive a square through game levels from its starting position to his goal, avoiding hazards and without falling down.
SkyRiot screens
SkyRiot is available for free for Android on Google Play and was released under open source and free content licenses on SourceForge.net [forum post].
SkyRiot is a 2D flying shooting platform action game for Android devices. Fly a hoverboard and use an assortment of weaponry as you, an anarchist, single-handedly wage war against a totalitarian regime. Full 360-degree aiming along with total freedom of movement will keep you glued to your device for many hours as you blast your way across over 10 game maps.
Otherwise, as previously mentioned, Garage Games has now also released their 2D game framework under the MIT license:
Their 3D game engine also saw some nice updates lately, however sadly their crowd funding push to port Torque3D to Linux fell (not totally unsurprisingly) short of their 30,000$ mark (with about 10,000$ pledged).
I have outed myself previously as not a big Minecraft fan, so take everything in this post with a grain of salt (as I obviously don't really understand that genre).
Seemingly made by people not happy with the recent commercialization of Ace of Spades, it's an all FOSS remake, those early development you can follow here (or on their Github page).
Now maybe the graphics are lacking on purpose (see disclaimer above), but I couldn't help to think: why for f***'s sake did they have to reinvent the wheel with their own engine instead of using for example Terasology:
Ahh well, at least it made me aware that Terasology is still very much under development, and with its focus on DungeonKeeper & Dwarf-Fortress elements, it might actually become a game I would play (and doesn't make my eyes bleed :p ).
Speaking of which... the guy behind AgentKeeper released yet another nice video and graphics are constantly further improved as seen here.
While Blender3D is one of the premier FOSS projects out there, its integral part the Blender Game Engine (BGE) is often belittled as not a serious game engine.
While the criticism is certainly not completely unfounded and the integration of limited "non-programming" game code creation (via logic bricks) gives it a bit of a "RPG maker" image, it really is a quite interesting platform to work on it seems. Ok, probably as of now the BGE is really more of a rapid game prototyping engine, but previous experience during the Yo, Frankie! project has actually shown that at least compared to some other well known FOSS engines, it is a serious contender (that Blender Foundation project originally started on Crystal Space, and after many problems was implemented in the BGE in a few weeks only).
So what makes it so interesting? Well for one there is the full integration with a creation tool (obviously Blender3D) so that getting your content into the game is only a matter of making it. No exporters or anything needed... it just works. Then of course there is the fully scriptability via Python, also integrated tightly. Basically you never have to exit Blender, and testing your game can be done right in the editor with one click (no compiling etc. necessary). Oh and did I mention the great physics capabilities via Bullet, also build right in?
In addition your created game will be immediately available on any platform the Blender Game player has been ported (all major desktop operating systems, with an Android port under development and a browser plugin, too). In addition you can choose to publish your game as a single .blend file, giving the users a direct access to all the source files of the game; a wet dream of any true FOSS game developer! The tight integration with the GPLed Blender Player, has been a major source of discontent with the predominately propitiatory game developing users of the BGE however. Thus there now exists also a few options to encrypt your game and/or run it on an external engine that can be kept close source (but I will not go further into that here).
You can find a lot of (sometimes really awesome looking: 1, 2, 3) game projects on the Blenderartists.org forum. Now as I said, most of it is sadly closed source with propitiatory artworks, but I also have the feeling that some simply don't know or care about the legal implications of their "freeware" game (which sadly shows that even many people who use a great FOSS tool, mostly care about the "free as in beer" aspect of it).
One of the more interesting projects right now (which might or might not become a full FOSS game) can be seen in this video:
It shows the most recent work by Martinesh, who is basically BGE's resident game art guru. Two years ago we already featured previous awesome work by him, but sadly that Air Race project is by now canceled. What he is now working on is however rather a show-case for the really nice new graphical features in the BGE which he and others are developing in the so called "candy" development branch (on his blog there are also more details and nice videos from some time ago).
Another cool recent project it the rewrite of the the logic bricks visual programming idea via nodal logic blocks called Hive.
While not completely integrated into Blender yet, you can already try it via an external editor (the created python code works fine inside Blender). There are also some tutorials and a documentation for it. Since my programming skills also lack somewhat, I find that an interesting tool... however most likely it is rather a nice way to do some level scripting, than actually programming the real guts of a game with it.
I mentioned this nice new project that appeared on our forums some time ago already, and while the promised source-code isn't available as of yet, a new and quite good looking video was recently posted:
Now as you can see, it shares quite a lot of graphics with OpenDungeons, which is not completely dead either, but there is at least some discussion to "jump ship" as AgentKeeper is progressing much quicker (with it being a University supported project). You can follow AgentKeepers progress here if you fancy some nice dungeon management simulator ;)
Having played the SD version back in the day on my GP2X handheld (and it seems to be available for Android nowadays too ;) ), I can assure you that the game holds up very well to today's standards, with a really cool and funny story and awesome voice acting. Higher resolution graphics thus can only make it better ;)
Looks like we will get some nice x-mas presents this year:
A bit delayed but probably right on time for the Mayan end of the world, we will see a long awaited new release of Cube2:Sauerbraten. Read about the release announcement here. Hmm, I wonder if it has already Occulus Rift support...
Also on the FPS front, AlienArena is having a major engine update, with a claimed massive 3-4 times speed increase in BSP rendering and more VBO improvements.
Furthermore they announce a new game-mode to be added soon, which tries to slow down the game-play of AlienArena a bit and add a more tactical appeal. Sounds a bit like selling out to the CounterStrike/ModernWarefare crowd to me, but lets see how it will play ;)
And in fact it will not only be a source-drop, but rather a significant update including a merger of their iOS code with the rest of the Torque2D one.
Also no Linux port yet, but just as for the 3D engine one will hopefully show up sooner or later.
P.S.: In case someone has missed it: SuperTuxKart had a very nice new release recently, bumping it up to version 0.8. See a video of it in action here.
Today I let the videos speak: First of all a nice FOSS bullet hell SHMUP, called Shmupacabra:
Taisei Project is maybe also relevant if you like getting killed ALOT (hehe, insider joke for q).
Previously mentioned Cube Trains (based on Frogatto) has reached version 1.0:
You can support the developer of this nice puzzle game by buying the Expansion-pack for 2 Canadian bucks or more! Another option to try and fund FOSS game development... maybe there will be some sales figures published at some point?
Next on the list: open-source engine reimplementation project Corsix-th:
You will need the original game for the non-free artworks though.
And last but not least: 0 A.D. got a brand new website: www.play0ad.com! Celebrating this they also made some nice video tutorials for total beginners:
Vee Software's Open Hexagon is a very, very recent game, but even in its short existence, it has already managed to stir up quite an amount of controversy, the matter being that Open Hexagon is none other than a free software clone of the popular iOS/Android game Super Hexagon, created by the equally popular indie developer Terry Cavanagh.
Now, video game clones are not a negative or uncommon thing at all, and have pretty much existed since the beginnings of video game history. However, Open Hexagon developer, Vee, has recently found himself the victim of some serious flak, the reason behind this being that he decided to release his own game clone before the much anticipated PC/Steam version of Super Hexagon. This resulted in a legion of rabid Cavanagh fans rushing in to accuse Vee of being a thief, a liar, and quite a variety of other unpleasant names and insults.
To make a few things clear, Open Hexagon is not only 100% free software, programmed from scratch using C++ and SFML (unlike Super Hexagon which is primarily based in Adobe Flash, with the PC port being completely redone in C++ as well), as it is also available for absolutely zero cost. It is not geared as a competitor for Super Hexagon, and it's certainly not trying to profit from its original concept at all. If anything it's actually attracting more attention towards the original game. If that wasn't enough, the developer actually took the time and decency to ask permission to Cavanagh himself to create his game, while he had no obligation to do so at all.
image: tweets between devs
What ensued was a deep and long-winded apology from Vee, to all Super Hexagon fans, and the subsequent approval of his game by Cavanagh, despite the fact that he was never against the idea, since day one. I guess all's well that ends well, but even though Cavanagh's reactions were fairly reasonable from his part, I still can't stop thinking that issues like this could have been easily avoided altogether, had he, and other indie developers such as him, made habit of releasing the source code of their own games, something that has, in fact, been done successfully in the past with surprisingly positive results.
Call me crazy, but I find it troubling that this new, so-called generation of “indie” developers and their supporters, heralded as the avant-guarde of video game originality, and as a counter-cultural movement that opposes industry stereotypes and its negative practices, shows so little knowledge and sensibility on matters of software freedom, and how it can be used to help and empower other amateur / independent developers such as themselves. The result is the accidental propagation, to their followers, of the gross misconception that for some reason, game concepts are the exclusive property of their authors, and that copying and innovating over other people's ideas is a wrong thing to do. Coincidently, Vee himself has shown some great eloquence on this matter in his written apology, which really makes me wonder how come there aren't more people like him in this new indie circle:
As a independent game developer, I wanted to create my own tribute version of the game, not only as an experiment, but also as a completely new experience: I wanted to make the game fully open, both as a free open-source product, and also as a customizable and scriptable game, in order to let people share their creations and have fun.
Now, the game itself is quite simple. You are a triangle spinning around a hexagon. Incoming polygons want you dead, so you have to dodge them. Sounds easy enough, right? It turns out it isn't. And it could be a lot more if you're whiling to help, because unlike Cavanagh, Vee crafted his game thinking of customization and the freedom to easily script, paint and construct your own levels in any way you wish.
image: Open Hexagon ad
Version 1.3 is out now, with updates pouring in, on a nearly daily basis, as Vee is still trying to shape his game into a more unique experience, a process in which you can take part as well! So if you have a mind for quick-reaction puzzle games and enjoy crafting your own personal conundrums for later enjoyment, or even showing them to your friends, by all means, download Open Hexagon, play it, and share your own levels with others!
Hot off the press is the news that id software has released the source-code to their Doom3 remastered BFG edition. Have a look at the code here. It seems like Mr. Carmack has back-ported a few nifty things from idTech5, so this is potentially quite useful for upcoming idtech4 based FOSS games.
In unrelated news, I am happy to report that we are now hosting the forums for the nice off-road racing game StuntRally. Join the discussion here.
Old StuntRally screenshot, too lazy to find another right now ;)
One of the really awesome features of that game is the track-editor by the way... have a look at some awesome video tutorials here. Given the Techno-style music in these and the awesome spline-based tracks, I actually think that a WipeOut like modification of this game would really rock, join the discussion I started on that here :D
