Nikki and the Robots

Nikki and the Robots is an incredibly cute platformer developed by people with exotic taste for revision control [Darcs repo] and programming language (Haskell). Read more on joyride's code page. There's a nikki wiki and a bug tracker.

A story mode is in development, which will be proprietary and for-pay.

Code is under LGPL and free-version-art under CC-BY-SA.

Development Video #03: Final Platforms

I made a little level pack:

celldropping 1-4 levelpack

[download | alt | backup]

Also: t-shirts!

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SDL.License = "zlib"; SDL.License != "LGPL"; TRUE

Everybody likes images!

SDL is now zlib-licensed [announcement].

Galaxy Gameworks will no longer be selling licenses to SDL, but will continue to support our existing customers.

SDL development will continue, but will largely be community driven and Ryan and I will continue to coordinate patch integration and SDL releases. We will be working to make it easier to contribute in a variety of ways, and are looking for people interested in helping out.

This piece of info came from @icculus and by the way: I didn't even know that SDL originated in Loki Software before icculus' talk. Wikipedia's SDL history is an interesting read (two paragraphs only too :) ).

The company behind SDL's commercial licensing has been Galaxy Gameworks for the last 2-3 years. The company will close doors to enhance a family's life if I read this post correctly.

(Have fun complaining about my source code title. I don't even know how to C. ;) )


PS: Would anyone like to contribute (to) a post about GSoC? I know how to compile a list of game projects that are involved but have never been involved with it in any form or even talked about it much with a participant about it.

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icculus' "Gaming on Linux" (adjusted for open source context :) )

A 1-hour talk. By a pretty cool guy called @icculus called Ryan C. Gordon. About games and open source.

Teaser: "We only did this because Linux gives us a woodie."

Gaming on Linux by Ryan C. Gordon

Download [.ogv | .m4v] (use context menu to surpress in-browser media player)

More talk recordings from the Flourish conference 2011 are here. If you have trouble with playback in the browser, you can always download the .m4v or .ogv files.

I enjoy watching Machinima's All Your History series. The 5-part id Software history is slightly relevant here, since you know.. open source fps engines.

Part 1 of id Software All Your History

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Myst Online Finally goes Open Source

After years of waiting and gamboling, Myst Online / Uru has opened the source to their client and 3d max plugin. At the same time, an open source replacement server has also been made available, so it's basically the whole package, minus the artwork.

They also re-opened their servers for anyone to play for free, so sign up, check it out, and donate! Unfortunately no Linux support at the moment, but hopefully a porting effort gets started soon (linux client here: http://plasmaclient.info ?)

To contribute, check out their development site here: http://www.openuru.org/

Edit: Kaelis, a long time community member, asked people to check out https://github.com/H-uru/Plasma as well, being run by a different group of people

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Search and Rescue I 1.3.0 and SaR II 2.0.0

SaR2

The 1.3.0 release of Search and Rescue mostly contains improvements from the fork SaRII and I'm not sure why the forking happened but I'm glad to read that it happened without bad blood. :)

SaRII aims for better looks and ease of use and it seems that SaR will take improvements from the fork but will also try to maintain backwards compatibility.

There are many ways to collaborate with the project [SaRII]:

• Designing new scenario files (no deep programming knowledge required)
• Designing some new missions (no deep programming knowledge required)
• Designing some new graphics and backgrounds for the menus.
• Finding and fixing bugs
• Improving documentation
• Adding new features
• Porting SaR II to other OSs
• Donating some cash 

It'd be great for SaR to be easier to get started with.

I will use page2rss.com to track changes of these two projects.

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Stunt Rally 1.1

Stunt Rally 1.1 looking awesome

Stunt Rally now compiles on Linux!

There is a two-part text-commented video tutorial for making new tracks on youtube [p1 | p2]. Check out this channel if you want to see more videos of the game.

Technology-wise the game is VDrift + Ogre + Pagedgeometry (also used in DungeonHack) + MyGUI.

Thumbs up to the project website following the "big screenshots on main page"-philosophy!

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Free Gamer = Freeware Gamer

I was thinking of writing an April fool's post but then started thinking over how confusing the terms "Free Software" and "Free" and "FOSS" often prove to be and after a quick chat that included all the authors of Free Gamer we will turn to Freeware because there are many more games in freeware space and it's much easier to deal with games when you don't care about licenses too much.

Our future logo

So I present to you: Freeware Gamer (site redesign and re-branding pending).

Stay tuned for lots of updates on games we played on Newgrounds and Facebook!

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