Zolo, Food Fight, GameLV - Treasure Hunt on Reddit!

A thread called "Post your Open Source Game" on the gamedev subreddit let me discover some new and old projects.

Here are three of them:

Zolo

A hyperactively fast jump and run with chainsaws: Zolo.

Food Fight

An OGRE-based real time strategy with vegetables and taco: Food Fight.

GameLV

An "adventure game in a post-soviet environment": GameLV.

Video Change Logs: Make Your Own!

[video: OpenMW 0.10.0 Change Log]

OpenMW has been steadily reporting about latest progress on their blog and now also released some video change logs with audio commentary.

Freedroid is another project that has been reporting their progress regularly. You can follow them and many more projects on our game planet or dev planet.

To me, short video commentary reports of progress are a delight. While it might be ineffective to make a video for each release, if the changes are not so many and the effort is high, but from time to time having a video change log might be better at getting players interested or developers impressed enough to contribute than a simple CHANGES.txt.

An interesting middle ground is what M.A.R.S. did for their last few releases: screenshot changelogs.

GLC is one of the two nice ways I use to record game videos - here STK

When it comes to gameplay video recording on Linux, I spent some time on the subject and for me it all boiled down to two methods:

1. GLC is ideal for games that use both OpenGL and ALSA
2. FFMpeg is an all-rounder, that is a bit slower but works fine if the machine is powerful enough or the resolution low enough

I will gladly offer my experience in recording videos and editing them on Linux to help you make your own. Just post in the comments, start a thread on the forums or email me via qubodup@gmail.com.

МедведьИгра - BearGame

Please bear with me for the duration of this post.

Медвед

BearGame игра про медведя прыгуящим на воздушных шарах. Актуальная альфа-версия была написана в Java.

  

видео: BearGame

Plee le Porter

BearGame n'est pas le seul jeu avec un ours. Par exemple, Plee The Bear est un jeu avec un ours comme personnage principal.

Neues Pac-Bär Logo

Des weiteren habe ich letztens das Logo für eine Berliner Hobbyspielentwicklergruppe namens Berlin Mini Jam überarbeitet. Dies hat nicht direkt was mit open source Spielen zu tun, aber einige von uns mögen die offene Soße und stellen unsere Spiele unter freien Lizenzen zur verfügung.

Thanks for Bearing!

PonyKart: Copyright Racer

PonyKart Logo

Yes, this is for real.

PonyKart. Windows only. They have a SourceForge project.

I don't know what to say.

GGJ License, EGP Feb 2012, STK Overworld, FG Interview

GGJ 2012 Theme

Global Game Jam 2012 is over and you can find all the by-nc-sa-licensed games here. We talked to the organizers about allowing free (as in freedom etc.) licenses and got some positive replies, but in the end it was too short a notice.

We ask you now to write a short message to GGJ, asking for the inclusion of further licenses, for example a GPL+CC-BY-SA combination for GGJ 2013. Also feel free to discuss this in the comments.

If you participated in GGJ, we would like to encourage you to release your games under free licenses in addition to the required nc license.

EGP February 2012

Speaking of jams, the 7day-jam-during-one-month by Experimental Gameplay Project is "Infinite Worlds" for this month.

STK Overworld

As recently announced, one of the new features in SuperTuxKart 0.8 will be an overworld-connected challenge system.

Durk Talsma: AI programmer

Flight Gear's blog released a new interview. You can find the other interviews so far linked in this post.

Classic gaming: OGS Mahjong

A somewhat neglected topic here on FreeGamer are classic puzzle games, and OGS Mahjong is definitely one of the gems of this genre:

OGS Mahjong 0.9 promo

The stable 0.9 release of this game can be expected shortly, so brush up your Mahjong skills or take the opportunity to finally learn the rules of this age-old classic (like me).

Coldest: Mech AI and Playtesting with the Dev!

Trees in Coldest

Video: Coldest's Crazy Bots

Bots were added to the mech fighting game Coldest. If you would like to help playtest the game together with the developer, follow the project's news feed (there will be an announcement for a session sometime soon) and get the git version via:

git clone git://coldestgame.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/coldestgame/coldestgame coldest

Build instructions here.

Mass Blaster: Ambidextrous Abstract Shooter

Synchronized shooting in Mass Blaster

Mass Blaster is one of the most intense arcade shooters for Windows and Linux. You will take control of two ships simultaneously to blast away at the invading Square Army. On your left, take down enemies with the red n' rad Trigerus. On your right, command the cool blue Pythagora to wipe out your foes. Choose from 4 modes of difficulty to fight your way through 10 gutsy levels. Only those with the skills to pilot both ships at the same time will go on to become High Score Heroes.

This game shares a vein with games like Avoision and pumps adrenaline. Intended for one player, Mass Blaster plays superb with two pilots as well. Just get a keyboard emulator and a joystick to avoid key locking.

Code is under GPL, while all other assets are under the not-so-free CC-BY-NC.

The silver lining of the MegaUpload shutdown

It's been big news online lately that MegaUpload was shut down.  Along with it, many of the other annoying, wait-60-seconds-and-fill-in-this-captcha-or-upgrade-to-premium file sharing services have stopped offering public downloads.  A lot of people are understandably upset about this, since in the case of MegaUpload, they don't even have access to their own files anymore.

This blog post isn't about whether it was right for MegaUpload to be shut down.  There's plenty of debate going on about that, and it's something that I'm not personally interested in taking part in.  What we do know is that there were a substantial number of people using MegaUpload to distribute pirated media, and, let's be honest: a lot of people are pissed off because piracy just got a lot harder.  If you're one of those people, and you're angry and suddenly in search of ways to entertain yourself in the wake of the big shutdown, this post is for you.

You may have already realized that to some extent piracy creates buzz about media.  If people enjoy a movie or a game or an album or whatever, they talk about it, and the word gets out, even if the person doing the talking pirated it.  This is not a justification for piracy, mind you.  If someone wants to make content and then threaten to send you to jail for using it the wrong way, that's their prerogative under copyright law.  On the other hand, people and companies who do that don't deserve your business, and they don't deserve the buzz that you create by talking about their media.  This is particularly true given the fact that they're spending the money you give them to curtail your freedoms through draconian legislation and copyright treaties.

Ask yourself this, dear reader:  Do I need the RIAA to tell me what music I ought to like?  Do I need the MPAA to tell me what movies to like?  Do I need crappy, DRM-loving, morally-bankrupt game studios like EA to tell me what games to like?  I mean, seriously, have you seen big budget movies lately?  Most of them are complete lowest-common-denominator tripe.  As intelligent individuals, we can do better than that.

There's an awful lot of media out there released for free (or at least very cheaply in some cases), directly by the artists, musicians, cinematographers, and game studios that make them.  Some people like to argue that piracy doesn't harm anyone if you never would have paid anyway; I would contend that by pirating big budget, mass-market crap, you're hurting dedicated artists who are releasing their work for free, because the time you spend finding a pirated copy of whatever it is you want to download could have been spent discovering and talking about their works.

Even better, you could spend some of that idle time creating entertainment rather than just being entertained.  If you haven't worked on your own art, music, movies, or game projects, I would strongly encourage you to try it out.  Creating entertainment for other people to enjoy and getting their feedback on it can be immensely satisfying.  As an honest aside here, even a brief browse through open media libraries will make it obvious that movies are by far the weakest link in this chain, followed by games.  Music, being easy now for individuals or bands to produce on a large scale at home with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment, is by far the strongest.  If regular people like us are willing to spend the time helping to create games and movies, we can close the gap.  It'll take time, but if we can pull it off, it'll be worth it.

Media doesn't have to come from a feeding tube.  Go out, look around, and see the world.  There's a lot more out there than the big studios would like you to believe.  And while it's not yet equal in some ways (special effects, etc) to the big budget stuff, your interest and contributions can help it get there, and at the same time help render the big studios and their anti-consumer copyright laws irrelevant.  The big studios may, to some extent, be able to make it more difficult to pirate their content.  What they cannot do is force us to give them money -- we can always choose not to watch their stuff.

Here are some places to get started.

Viewing:

• SoundCloud
• Jamendo
• Some open movies
• Wikipedia's list of web television series 
• Wikipedia's list of free and open source computer games
• Indie Game Reviewer
• GameBoom
• Armor Games

Getting involved:

• Creative Commons
• Free Software Foundation
• Electronic Frontier Foundation

Creating:

• Scirra Construct
• OpenGameArt.org (disclaimer:  yeah, it's my site ;) )
• WeAreTheMusicMakers on Reddit
• BandCamp

If you have other sites to add to this list, drop me a line and I'll add them.  In the meantime, go discover something. :)

P.S.  If you agree with this, tell people about it.  Retweet, reblog, upvote, +1, whatever.  I can talk about this all day, but we need a real movement if this is going to change anything, and that means we need people to be aware.

Flesh Snatcher: Bloody Java Polygons

Scenes from Flesh Snatcher

Flesh Snatcher is a bloody jME2 fps with fast movement and dodge-bullets gameplay that is low poly and low-tech enough to run smoothly on a netbook (tested: Asus EeePC 1000H).

Most models were made by the author, Arbaro was used for tree generation, FSRad (shared source, noncommercial) was used for lightmap generation. FOSS-incompatible textures from CGTextures were used.

The code license is not all that clear, I seem only to be able to find the jME license in the archive.

This active thread reveals more info and gives an opportunity to talk to the developer.

Traction Edge: Squad-Based Tactics, Roguelike Interface

Traction Edge is a story driven, turn based strategy game set in a Steampunk Victorian England. Gameplay is similar to the Gollop Brothers UFO or Lasersquad series in that you have "Action Points" to spend during your turn. The game also borrows heavily from roguelikes in both look and feel.

Traction Edge is currently under development and is considered alpha software. It is playable but limited. v0.2 was released for the Annual Roguelike Release Party 2011. It is distributed as source only and requires SFML 1.6 (not 2.0) and cmake to build.

Current Features:

• Turn based gameplay
• 2-4 member squad teams
• Destructable terrain
• Victorian Steampunk setting
• SFML based, rescalable on the fly, 16x16 graphical tiles.

Planned Features:

• 16-20 static levels with full story arc
• Random content, procedural maps
• Procedural tech tree
• Civilians
• Z-levels

You can keep track of all development activity using this feed. The Linux distro that I use doesn't support SFM 1.6 any more, which makes me unable to test this interesting sounding and looking squad tactics game.

Annex: Conquer the world Beta2 released

A new beta of the Megaglest based standalone game Annex: Conquer the World has been released recently:

Annex beta2 game-play

Most important news for me: real Linux support out of the box now ;)
But there are also a few other nice changes, like additional tileset and units etc. The game also has its own master-server now, thus not depending on the Megaglest one any longer.

TremZ updates

As reported previously, the release of the Tremulous "reboot" TremZ has been pushed back to Spring 2012 and with news of their project lead "Volt" having stepped down due to burn-out, things don't look too bright for that date either...

Showing off the high art quality of the new alien models

However the new guys in charge seem to try hard and aim to improve community relations (see their slightly older forums) further by opening up a development blog.
Here they also posted a link to their PR image dump from which I took this very recent picture:

The new human marine model (high-poly base for normal-maps)

I have to say that I am really impressed by most of their artwork so far, and last time I asked they assured me that it will be almost completely licensed under the CC-by-SA (with a sad exception of a few audio works that will be CC-by-SA-NC upon request by the creator).

So I hope I will not be proven wrong when saying: TremZ will the THE FOSS game of 2012 :)

RetroBlazer Alpha demo

RetroBlazer alpha demo

Looks pretty nice, this Darkplaces based game, doesn't it? And you can download a RetroBlazer alpha demo now... take it with a grain of salt though as my intuition tells me that this is probably planned to be a commercial release based on a FOSS engine like SteelStorm. While this is of course not bad in general (in fact personally I think there should be more FOSS based commercial games), I always get a lot of flak in the comments for posting about games with un-Free media or such ;)

On a side-note however (after playing the demo for a short while) I have to say that it is a bit too retro for me (no proper mouse aiming? is it like 1996?). I was hoping for more of a hybrid than a strait Doom reimplementation ;)

Winter Shorts 3: Wizznic Cursor, TORCS Music, Knights Deathmatch, Humm and Strumm Specs, SuperTux Contest

Wizznic! received more GUI enhancements [video (00:57@YouTube)]
TORCS 1.3.2 brings menu music into the game [.ogg (05:50/7.1MB)]
Knights 0.19 features deathmatch [description]
Humm and Strumm is an in-dev co-op game engine [design .pdf (156kB)]

SuperTux' level contest has four entries so far [submission thread]

Winter Shorts 2: Wizznic! Mouse Input, Me and My Shadow New Look, Epiar Cleanup, GemRB Platforms and Games

Wizznic!

Wizznic! supports mouse & touchscreen. [Video] Code available on GitHub.

MeAndMyShadow

MeAndMyShadow 0.2rc1 is out. It features tutorial, in-game help, a new default visual style and an improved editor.

video: Epiar 0.5.0 game start

Epiar 0.5.0 has been released:

• UI clean-up
• Expanded missions system
• Sound and music additions
• Main menu
• Editor greatly expanded
• Misc. bug fixes

GemRB logo

GemRB 0.7.0 was released recently. Their wiki received a clean-up as well. The engine re-implementation runs on Android and iOS. BG, TotSC, BGII, ToB, IWD and HoW can be played start to end. Some features are missing and there are some new features too.

New FPS updates

As the FPS resident gamer here at FreeGamer (I am playing usually under the nick poVoq btw ;) ) I am keeping you up to date to the newest FPS updates:

Hot of the press: the cosmic edition (1.2) of Red Eclipse was just released; Lots of new maps and feature additions (and they toned down that annoying hit-sound a bit). Sadly their trailer-contest has not resulted in a cool video yet that I could post here, so take this opportunity to make a cool one ;)

Another new release (7.53) comes from the AlienArena guys, which seem to have made some nice updates to their engine to speed up the performance on higher settings.

Alien Arena 7.53

Quick rundown of other news:
War§ow got a new website, and there is a nice teaser webpage up for TremZ (no surprise to me btw, that they pushed back their release date by 2 months). But the engine (OpenWolf) they are using is making nice progress also as you can see here (and here in a video: integration of Newton Physics and more).

Renegade Ops [Rus/Eng] [RePack]

Renegade Ops

• Developer: Avalanche Studios (SE)
• Publisher: SEGA
• Genre: Shooter
• Release Date: October 26, 2011 (US)

About Renegade Ops

Renegade Ops puts players in a mobile commando unit sent behind enemy lines to defeat Inferno, a madman intent on global domination. Defeat enemies across a range of stunning environments using a wide variety of vehicles, from dispersing electromagnetic shock waves to the deployment of a huge Gatling gun armed to the teeth.

Minimum System Requirements

• OS: Windows Vista/7
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.6 Ghz / AMD Athlon Phenom X3 @ 2.4 GHz
• Memory: 2 Gb
• Hard Drive: 10 Gb free
• Video Memory: 256 Mb
• Video Card: nVidia GeForce 8600 / ATI Radeon HD 2600
• Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
• Network: Broadband Internet Connection for Online Multiplayer
• DirectX: 10
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• DVD Rom Drive

Recommended System Requirements

• OS: Windows Vista/7
• Processor: Intel Core i5 @ 2.66 GHz / AMD Phenom II X4 @ 2.8 GHz
• Memory: 3 Gb
• Hard Drive: 10 Gb free
• Video Memory: 512 Mb
• Video Card: nVidia GeForce GTS 250 / ATI Radeon HD 5750
• Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
• Network: Broadband Internet Connection for Online Multiplayer
• DirectX: 10
• Keyboard
• Mouse
• DVD Rom Drive

Download Renegade Ops – Direct Link

Click Here – 2.29 GB

www.elj-games.blogspot.com

Scooby-Doo! First Frights [RePack]

Scooby-Doo! First Frights

• Developer: Torus Games
• Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
• Genre:  Action
• Release Date: 2011

About Scooby-Doo! First Frights

The game begins with the Mystery, Inc. gang at their "incorporation" (really just a small house in a swamp, as seen in Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed). Velma arrives with a newspaper, announcing to the gang that there will be a food festival at Keystone Castle. Scooby and Shaggy like the idea of going, but Daphne reminds them that they promised to help her cousin Anna at the St. Louis High School Musical. Scooby and Shaggy want to help her, but they plan to get it done quickly so they can go to the food festival. The game divides in to four episodes from here.

Download Scooby-Doo! First Frights – Direct Link

Click Here - 362 MB

www.elj-games.blogspot.com