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.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

Node Reviver: Open Source Ludum Dare Puzzle Prototype (GPLv3/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

image: Node Reviver main screen 

video: Node Reviver 1.0 Gameplay Video 

Game development jams bring many lines of usually dirty code that power often innovative new implementations of various mechanics and rules. Ludum Dare requires source to be visible but neither code nor art has to be freely licensed.

I believe that the histories of TuxKart/SuperTuxKart, Warzone 2100 and OpenArena show that maintenance can be one of the strengths of the open source game development scene. Having more gamejam-made working prototypes available under "safe" free licenses would enable this community to pick up promising projects and slowly build upon them.

Anyways, one of the games that has more than proper licensing information and is both free, open source code and art is Node Reviver. A short description:

• Game mechanics and level designs intersecting with Pac-Man's PipeWalker's.
• Light neon colors on black background visuals.
• Bfxr sound effects (with sound sources included, nice!)

Links:

• GitHub project page
• Developers' blog
• Node Reviver on PyGame.org

Continue Reading

OpenGOO and Using Inkscape or Blender for Editing Maps/Levels

Building bridges in OpenGOO

video: New Physics in OpenGOO

You may remember that in the first Humble Indie Bundle, World of Goo was not open-sourced. Well, there is an active open source clone called OpenGOO being developed. It uses OpenGL, Box2D and is GPLv3-licensed.

Basic layers of level creation in OpenGOO

A Shotgun Debugger level viewed in Inkscape

There are instructions available for creating levels. Inkscape is used for that purpose, just like in Shotgun Debugger! A method I would love to see being widely used in games that allow for user-generated content in general.

SuperTuxKart level editor (hint: it's Blender!)

Speaking of not-re-inventing-wheels: the team behind SuperTuxKart recently posted an article about using Blender as a level editor, rather than writing and maintaining an own content creation tool, which I highly recommend to all developers of 3D games with 'traditional' engines.

Continue Reading

Good FOSS 3D action RPGs, nowhere to be found?

Today I got a small rant:
So there are a few really prominent types of games which ought to have their FOSS representatives, right?
Ok, well a few like epic story driven single-player games will probably never show up due to inherent problems to develop such games through the FOSS method, but besides that lets have a look what we got:

• Good and playable FOSS multi-player FPS games under active development? 
• Check! (Xonotic, RedEclipse and several other with un-free media)
• Good and playable FOSS RTS games under active development?
• Check! (0 A.D., MegaGlest, Warzone2100, Spring mods etc.)
• Good and playable FOSS racing games under active development?
• Hmm... not an expert, but I guess Speed Dreams and Stunt Rally apply.
• Flight simulators, turn based strategy?
• Check: Flightgear!
• Check: Battle for Wesnoth!
• Action RPGs like Diablo or Torchlight?
• Hmmm???

Ok... sure you will find some other genres (Mechsims, realistic tactical FPS etc.) which also lack a much played/far into development FOSS representative, but given the (current) popularity of action RPGs lets have a look at what we do have:

So, there is the really cool project FLARE, which besides being not really playable yet is also more of a nostalgic effort. More playable but also with a similar demographic of potential players is Freedroid (besides having a maybe too Linux centric style).

FLARE 2D graphics style

Maybe of interest seem to be DawnRPG and PARPG, but for both the above applies as well and they seem to be going into a rather different direction. Besides that, at least the latter seems to be not progressing well lately.

Then there are the obscure and/or non-isometric DNT and Lips of Suna. Which are both nice projects on their own (especially LoS seems to develop nicely as of late), but are not really suitable as the FOSS reference for action RPGs...

The only game that comes to my mind that would fit is Summoning Wars, which is somewhat playable and even has a single-player campaign, but development is really slow and it is still a long way off what I would call a recommendable game to non-FOSS enthusiasts.

Some new dungeon wall tests

All in all it is a very promising project, which is IMHO hold back by its lack of content creation tools (mainly, but not only a world editor). This is probably partially because of the intention to have randomly generated dungeons, but those are still really bland to look at, and should be complemented by parts or at least towns that are nicely designed by hand (those also exists, but must have been done in a text editor or such ;) ).

Part of the rather slow development I guess was the poor choice of the graphics engine, e.g. OGRE 3D which is foremost a programmers choice (due to nice features and good documentation), but a rather bad FOSS game developers choice in my opinion (due to the lack of a complete game-engine features and good tools).

There are still a few really talented artists trying to contribute (1,2,3), and I recently proposed a creative re-use of 0 A.D. assets, but everything seems to be hitting a road block when it comes to easy tinkering with the game and getting things to actually run in game... and that is really demotivating to potential contributors (FOSS development advise 101 ;) ).

So to sum it up? I think Summoning Wars is really not living up to what it could be, and the only solution I see would be the addition of a new and really motivated programmer to the team to solve the tool-chain problems and thus restart the active development again. Anyone interested???

P.S.: Not to forget mentioning it: There is also the IrrRPG builder, which could probably be a good base to build an action RPG too.

Continue Reading

Dust Racing: high speed, Qt-based, cross-platform, with editor

Four Dust Racing screenshots (not split-screen!), pink player against yellow AI cars

Dust Racing (Dustrac) is a tile-based, cross-platform 2D racing game written in Qt (C++) and OpenGL. Dustrac comes with a Qt-based level editor for easy level creation. A separate engine, MiniCore, is used for physics modeling. CMake is used as the build system.

Planting trees on the road in Dustrac's Qt-based level editor

Graphics are SVG-based (sources included) and and the editor is simple and has a flat learning curve. GPLv3 is named as the license, no special license is named for the graphics, so the same might apply.

Dustrac's controls feel smooth and I love the object physics and the visualization of the trees.

Continue Reading

Cube Train, Frogatto development and LPC

Today is another session of: "Look what I found in my FG spam folder" ;) But this time I am actually adding a lot of nice other stuff to it, so that it is almost a "dev-corner" post!

But first things first... the frogatto developers made us aware that there is a new game based on their really nice 2D engine, called Cube Trains:

Cube Trains Beta gameplay

Note that, just like frogatto, the final version will cost a few pennies, but the engine is totally FOSS and the current Beta is still free to download.

This seems to fit to the general idea of the folks behind this engine as they outlined in the email to us:

I'm really glad we now have a second major title done in frogatto's engine, because we're gradually trying to position frogatto's engine as an open-source alternative to closed-source packages like GameMaker or RPGMaker;  partly just because development tools are one software category that benefits far more than other categories from being open-source, but also because our engine technology is a lot better than GameMaker;  we're fully GPU-accelerated, and we've got a much better internal programming language.  We've got a ways to go, since GameMaker still has a bunch of advantages over us on the gui side, but we're getting there.

Cube Trains is not one of them, but eventually, we're hoping to build a stable of "starter kits" for different game types - like GameMaker has, built under a CC0 license so they're suitable not just for GPL games, but for absolutely anything (indie titles being a big one).  Hopefully that was we can get a bunch of people from the indie gaming crowd behind an open-source tool.

Which seems like a pretty good idea to me, and looking at the awesome features they recently showcased in three tutorials (1,2,3) I wholeheartedly agree with the comment on their superior engine technology!

Speaking of the frogatto engine and tutorials I can elegantly lead to my other topic today, as the people behind the currently pre-warming Liberated Pixels Cup, aka our friends from OpenGameArt, are also endorsing the use of that engine as outlined here. The have also recently featured another really nice 2D game dev. tile editor, and hot of the press is the news that the Mozilla foundation has joined the FSF and Creative Commons as a main sponsor of the event!
With Mozilla also came a significant cash contribution, which means that the initial goal of US$ 10,000 has been reached, but you can still up the ante!

It seems that this comes along a general push from the Mozilla Foundation towards more HTML5 gaming (now part of the LPC too), supported by the fact that they have recently released a nice RPG game demo (BrowserQuest) and are working even on a 3D engine called Gladius.

Ah and not to forget: OGA has also recently added a nice featured tutorial section to their site... so nothing is holding you back to finally become an active part of the FOSS game-development community... yes, I said YOU! :D

Continue Reading

GameLV: Completely Free, Open Source Point And Click Post-Soviet Adventure Game

Post-Soviet Adventure's protagonist cleaning up the inventory

The story of GameLV: Adventure Game in Post Soviet Environment (Post-Soviet Adventure) begins with your dog having gone missing and your only lead being a meat product factory. For about one hour you point-and-click through pre-rendered environments, hunt pixels, read humorous descriptions and dialogues to reach a resolution.

I for one appreciate the humor in AGiPSE's humor, which I might have a high affinity to due to do my roots in Russia and my life taking place in eastern Berlin most of its time.

Be warned though: references to drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, pornography and violence are common in this game.

Post-Soviet Adventure is available in English and Latvian languages, both text and voice, although the English voices are incomplete.

video: [English Voices] Adventure in Post Soviet Environment (GameLV) by snauts (Artūrs Grebstelis)

The engine features savegames and scene animations and uses image masks to set define interactive areas. Text files seem to be used for defining the game.

To use voices, see following note:

So here is GameLV HEAD from our local repo with half way done english speech that has terrible pronunciation and was abandoned. http://piepe.lv/game-lv/assemble.tgz
That "assemble" is the same as "data" directory on https://github.com/snauts/GameLV, just put your binary in there and run.
P.S. My uplink to foreign countries is slow, so it should take a while for you download it. [mediafire mirror]
P.S.S If you want to run latvian version issue (in assemble directory)
sed "s/\-en//" *.lst -i
UI will still be in english because UI strings are compiled into engine.

Both code and art are freely licensed and the very nice music was even written and performed for the game. Some sounds have unknown sources though and finding freely licensed replacements on Freesound and OpenGameArt would be a way to contribute to the project.

Continue Reading

April Snippets

Reaction 1.0 Beta is an Action Quake 2-like based on ioq3 with "freeware" BY-NC-SA assets.

A list of open source Minecraft-style games was recently shared in a Reddit thread.

219 bytes tron is:

<body id=b onkeyup=e=event onload=
  z=c.getContext('2d');
  z.fillRect(s=0,0,n=150,x=11325);
  setInterval("
    0<x%n
    &x<n*n
    &(z[x+=[1,-n,-1,n][e.which&3]]^=1)
      ?z.clearRect(x%n,x/n,1,1,s++)
      :b.innerHTML='game⬜over:'+s
  ",9)
><canvas id=c>

Swallow for browser-based games , as introduced in a AltDevBlogADay post, is:

• A directory scanner which packages files into a single JSON file
• A small part of your build chain

Continue Reading

Black Dog: HTML5 Helicopter in Hell by Wilbefast

screenshot of Black Dog: A fallen angel flying through hell's caves, burdened by mystical weights, with progress being limited by only slowly regenerating feathers, the many-tongued flying black beast directly behind the angel (interpretation of reviewer)

Black Dog is a dark-theme reaction/precision type side-scroller that will run in your modern HTML5/Javascript-supporting browser. It has beautiful minimal original pixel artwork and at the same time uses works from OpenGameArt.

I highly recommend following Wilbefast if you're interested in Android game development and game dev jams. Most content is related to open source and will soon be added to our FreeGameDev PlanetDev feed aggregator.

Continue Reading

New Me and My Shadow release

Almost forgot posting about this... somehow our "own" projects here on FreeGameDev.net get somewhat neglected on the blog from time to time...

But it's not because we don't care ;) So check this great new trailer for Me and My Shadow:

New Me and My Shadow trailer

Or head over to the release announcement on our forums to read about the changes in version 0.3 and download it! Don't forget to comment too ;)

Continue Reading

Trophy 2.0: championship, shop, load/save

Trophy's shop

The top-down racing/shooting game Trophy 2.0 brings championship, shop, key configuration, load/save features and lot of code refactoring. It requires ClanLib 1.0, which unfortunately fails to compile on Arch Linux.

If you too can't get this game to run, there's still Bandit Racer for playing in the browser.

Continue Reading

Unknown Horizons Multiplayer Session March 10, 4:00 pm GMT

image: Unknown Horizon's multiplayer menu

There have been six updates on Unknown Horizon's blog this year alone and their latest is an invitation to a multiplayer gaming session.

Saturday, March 10, 16:00 GMT (convert to your time zone)

You will have to get and compile the development builds for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows but the guidelines are extensive and you can get real-time support via IRC, so don't let that intimidate you. :)

images: showing off Unknown Horizon's multiplayer chat

Continue Reading

Onslaught Arena Now Open Source Code!

Onslaught Arena

Onslaught Arena, a HTML5 top-down shooter that has a non-space-ship-scenario, is now open source code, non-free assets on GitHub.

video: Onslaught! Arena: How to beat the Green Dragon

The assets are included under non-commercial terms and the developers did not have the time to read about Creative Commons licenses, which I'm sure is one of the reasons why CC-BY-SA isn't widely adopted: time. If you are able to give a concise description, please do in this thread.

Three LostCast moderators

The team's blog is also home to a podcast about HTML5 games.

Continue Reading

Ancient Beast now Free as in Freedom!

A little while ago, Ancient Best dropped the NonCommercial license they were using for art and assets and are now DFSG-free.

Facebook announcement about Ancient Beast's license change

The game runs in HTML5 and is a turn based strategy in early, active development. It is supposed to run on low-spec computers.

Ancient Beast Battle Mock-Up

Their 1.4 G repository of concepts, drawings, mockups, audio files and 3d models is impressive:

 Ancient Beast Concept Art

Ancient Beast Icons

More can be seen in the official gallery

You can support the project through PayPal, Bitcoin and Flattr here.

Continue Reading

Short: Gigalomania and CTruck3D

Losing in Gigalomania

Gigalomania [blog] is an open source 2D Real Time Strategy game, for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Nokia smartphones (Symbian, Maemo and Meego). The gameplay consists of researching and developing new technology with which to conquer your enemies, from rocks and sticks to nuclear weapons and spaceships. You can advance through ten different ages, from the stone age to the future. There are 28 different maps to play through.

CTruck3D

CTruck3D is a simple-looking OpenGL truck simulator.

term_CTruck3D

There is an ASCII-Art variant called term_CTruck3D.

EDIT: What's quite interesting about the game is the marketing(?). Two YouTube accounts seem to be quite excited about the game: simhgamedev and violinperforming.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

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!

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading

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.

Continue Reading