Shoot Me Up Shoot Em Ups

Somehow I'm missed yesterday... shit happens!

My favourite RPG project Scourge now comes with outdoor areas which look rather promising. The progress on this project has been relentless which I really enjoy seeing. All it needs is some modellers to start producing some nice character models and some better decorations and it will look beautiful. I think the somewhat light-hearted premise for the storyline might be putting off potential players though so it would also be nice to see somebody product a mod for this game with a more serious storyline. Scourge is designed to be moddable.

Zaxxon Remake is a remake of the Sega game [surprisingly called] Zaxxon. The remake runs on both Linux and Windows but does not seem to be open source. I have contacted the author to encourage him otherwise. Anyway it's an isometric shoot-em-up, something not too well represented in the Free gaming world. I can think of a handful but they are all quite shallow games, perhaps Chromium BSU and KRaptor being the main protagonists, RTTS and Rafkill are two others. Outside of those you are looking at the abstract shooters like Gunroar, Parsec47, and rRootage.

Short and sweet today. That's all. :-)

Some Might Say

Want to simulate running your own college or university? You can. And it's open source. I post this purely out of amazement that somebody would program such a "game".

Perhaps a more relevant simulation game is, er, running your own game design company. GameBiz: The Magical Years and GameBiz 2 (download) provide such an experience, but only freeware and on Windows. Again, posted purely out of intrigue.

Back on to more, er, better-er things... version 0.3 of SuperTuxKart is imminent. :-)

There has been a spike in activity of late as the developers try to push out the next version, which now uses SDL instead of PLIB. There is an RC available for download (released quietly earlier in May) if you want to help test things. The main weakness of the game is now the quality of the tracks. Hopefully a new release will attract a few people interested in creating some good new tracks for the game. They also need help creating a Windows build for the next release.

CuteGod mockup

LostGarden, where the author is creating some lovely free graphics to encourage game programmers to create some free games, is issuing some challenges and outlines a basic game he wants to see somebody prototype, called CuteGod. The game design is an interesting read, drawing inspiration from Populus but having a character of it's own.

LostGarden ran a previous challenge called SpaceCute for which a few prototypes were already created. It's interesting to see an artist challenging programmers by proving both art and a game design. It's quite different to the usual approaches taken by designing open source games where usually the art is created for the game and not the other way around - here the game is created for the art. The advantages of this are clear goals and something that is tangible and looks good with only the basic code in place.

Damnation of Gods Damnation of Gods is

Haha, forgot to give the post a title so Blogger gave it this interesting one instead!

Damnation of the Gods

Damnation of the Gods is a project to make a game similar to Dungeon Master and the Eye of the Beholder series. For those not familiar with them, they are pseudo 3D RPGs - that is you have a first person view but you can only move on a grid (i.e. north, south, east, west) and the graphics are generally 2D sprites for both the environment and game characters. Unlike roguelikes the game is realtime so waiting around is not advisable. There's only a couple of screenshots but they show a fair amount of progress. You can play the latest version (0.17) on Linux or (via MingW) Windows. The author slightly confuses the term freeware with open source on the homepage but DotG is definitely open source.

Eye of the Beholder II was one of my favourite games when I was growing up. It was challenging, immersive, and had excellent graphics for it's time. It was a tough game, and I don't think me or my brother ever completed it despite buying guides with full maps and solutions to each level.

There's an update to Thunder & Lightening, the 3D air combat game. This release provides only a Linux binary although if you are desparate to play on Windows, the author may cave into a few requests. With major gameplay enhancements, a tutorial mission, a new scripting language, and bugfixes, it looks worth checking out.

Another game I want to check out is Lengendary Legions. Although it looks similar to Wesnoth (fantasy hex-based strategy) I'm sure it has a character all of it's own but without playing it and with little explicit information on the website, I really need to download it and have a crack. There is a gameplay video but there's only so much you can discern from that especially with the, er, interesting music.

At the moment there is no AI so it's player vs player only (local or networked).

Finally, you can get an unoffficial Linux binary of StarShip Troopers: Last Defense from here. YMMV.

A Bit About Me

How wonderfully ironic that on the 1st anniversary of the inception of Free Gamer, I forgot to actually post. Lack of time and focus on work robbed me of the time required to bring you the usual high quality rambling.

Another thing that seems forgotten is the Free Gamer Awards I so enthusiastically thought up a few weeks back. Fear not, as soon as I am done procrastinating planning them properly, it will all come together. Fortunately they are entitled the Free Gamer Awards 2007 which gives me another 6 months to execute them. *grin*

As you may have noticed, I called this post, "A bit about me." I won't be talking about myself - sorry to disappoint you - just a bit about this blog. (Yes, a blog can have a sense of self, y'know.) I feel that one of the reasons FG has people reading it daily is because I stay fairly on-topic. I don't talk about much else other than Free Software games (ok, throw in a few freeware titles) and the aspects surrounding the development of said games.

One of the principle reasons I created FG was because there was a lack of a similar resource at the time - the Linux Game Tome was probably the closest thing but that's dedicated to Linux games meaning some open source titles never get exposure and many commercial ones do. The thing is, commercial game publishers can afford to market themselves. And open source is open source, regardless of platform. I wanted to put to use all the otherwise-useless open source game knowledge I was accumulating each day. The end goal was to highlight the best Free games out there and give exposure to upcoming projects.

In that regard I think FG has somewhat succeeded. Up to 1000 hits daily (~950) is a decent platform for giving an open source game or two a bit of extra traffic.

On top of that, this blogging thing can become an obsession. Seeing the hit rate rise, seeing where traffic comes from, seeing how much in paltry adsense revenue you can acquire (I'm almost at $80 from something like 100,000 hits), it becomes an addiction. Now the addiction has passed, the challenge is to keep it going with interesting content without having to spend upwards of 4-5 hours a day doing research.

In that regard I have failed slightly. To get FG where I want it to be in terms of content (the lists, articles, etc) I need to spend more time on it than I can. So, sadly, it becomes a slow process of getting it there and I just hope some or most of you keep checking in whilst I grind it out. It'll be there eventually, it's just in life certain things must come first.

Anyway, time to put an end to this narcisissm.

The FIFE team are running a contest to lure in some graphics contributions. Win the contest and get a feature of your choice coded into FIFE. Please, somebody, create an awesome graphic, win the contest, then make them add in support for mighty morphing power rangers. Or take it seriously, whichever you prefer. :-)

Until next time (which will be Monday - I'm away all weekend), enjoy creating and playing those Free games.

By the Kilo

Over on the Ubuntu forums, I came across a post looking for whelp with a new game - Project Kilo is an ambitious new project to create a commercial grade RPG.

Arkhart

Now, often I see people talk about how they want to create the next Oblivion and give up when they find out that just using just a paperclip and some bluetack only gets you a bluetacky paperclip and really creating something like an RPG take significant dedication, talent, and desire. As such, it is easy to poor water on these little fires by replying to such threads with a dose of reality - that commercial grade RPGs take a team of paid developers and artists years to create. And that previous efforts have just stagnated to the point of no hope (think Arkhart).

However I remember when Hero of Allacrost was just the dream of their lead developer Roots and he was canvasing for support and plugging away regardless of negative responses. Now look where they are - Allacrost is really shaping up nicely and turning into an excellent game. If progress keeps up, it will be one of the best FOSS games out there.

Back to Project Kilo, it could fill a fairly significant hole in the Free game scene. There are few ambitious RPGs out there - maybe Open Outcast although that's not a traditional orcs and arrows RPG. MMORPGs are not the same thing so do not count as RPGs which contain a strong single player element and do not require learning the l33t rulez and befriending level 14223 sorcerers.

The fella behind Kilo seems determined so it'll be interesting to monitor any follow up. It looks like the project may use Crystal Space. The beauty of making an open source game is that there is no deadline or nervey investors so developers can dream - the trick is finding enough people whom share that dream to the point that they will help realise it.

Speaking of MMORPGs, Iris2 - the 3D Ultima Online client - is officially out. So UO players should be celebrating in their online havens. >:-)

Irrlamb

Woah a nice new Free game!

Irrlamb is described by it's developer(s) as "a 3D game that probably involves a lot of physics and frustrating gameplay." It looks really awesome. Check out the gameplay video. Think Marble Madness and add lots of fun extra ways to interact with objects using your spherical token. I especially liked the scene depicting the player sphere on top of a larger sphere and using cog-like mechanics to make it roll. Irrlamb looks fun and when I next get a free moment you can be sure I'll be trying it - it's available for Linux and Windows.

Irrlamb just goes to show that with a bit of thought, you can take an old concept and put an original spin on it. Pun intended. ;-)

I saw that one over on happypenguin.org and there's a few other game updates on the 'tome. I won't duplicate them here.

One not there yet is the latest Stendhal release, version 0.60 of this console-style MMORPG. Language is a funny thing, console meaning two quite different things depending on the context. Anyway, in the unlikely event that you are confused, here it means an old school Zelda-like game.

These days Stendhal, which should run on anything that supports Java, incorporates a fairly large world to meander around, since it has been in development for several years. I'm not sure how immersive a console-style MMORPG could ever be but the beauty of free will is that different people like different things and evidently people like these types of game as there is a few around.

On a more development oriented note, I came across this rather cool page with lots of resources on various engines over on devmaster.net.

Darsana

There's a new Ultimate Stunts release, 0.7.1, which adds a few nifty features and fixes a few commonly reported bugs. This open ended driving game continues it's history of steady development, something I like to see in open source games.

Our newly incepted project Fortress continues to attract interest and we now have a wiki collecting together information on the both Castles (the game that inspires Fortress) and how we want to see Fortress evolve. Hopefully in the next few weeks a bit of prototyping will occur, but a bit of planning in the meantime should scope out the project nicely.

Fortress will also provide me an opportunity to write some articles on the issues that affect open source game development. (I was tempted to write "successfully developing an open source game" but then that's just setting myself up.)

Darsana

Somebody brings up Darsana in the Ubuntu forums. They call it beautiful, well, that's perhaps a little strong. It does look interesting though, an FPS with a medieval setting. However there seems to be some furore over the licensing of it. Whilst it uses the Dark Places engine (a highly modified version of the Q1 engine released by iD) which is licensed under the GPL, the author of Darsana believes that he is under no obligation [2] to release the source to the game. Now that's something I would need to look into deeper before I could comment properly on it (there are various nuances to the virality of the GPL so I'm not sure how it would affect mods) but it is intriguing.

To add to the Darsana soap opera, it appears that the source to version 1.0 has been lost, although work continues on version 2.0 of the game.

I came across the online gaming magazine Escapist. It's layout is beautiful, although totally image based. Whilst not open source specific, I found it quite interesting. Plus there's an article about girls in gaming. Seriously, I could barely believe it either, girls can play computer games. Next thing you'll be telling me is that they can play sports too! ;-)