My Games Design

F-Zero and Wipeout set the standard for the futuristic sci-fi racing games genre and inspire many game developers. Over the years, four projects of that genre were started and developed to a playable state that are now open source code: H-Craft by Irrgheist is a free sci-fi racer with IAP on Android. It is built with the Irrlicht engine and was recently released as free software  with freeware data. While gameplay is simple without pickups, boosts or weapons, the campaign keeps it interesting. The 180�-Turns used in H-Craft level design are very refreshing to the genre. CoreBreach is a commercial anti-gravity racing game with combat gameplay. There is a freeware dataset that allows compiling and playing a simpler-looking version. Being an Objective C project, it was unusual to compile for me on latest Arch Linux but possible . Campaign mode, weapons and split-screen multiplayer make it cover many bases. Racer  is the only project with 100% free as in freedom data, yet unfort...

It's time for another installment of the somewhat bi-monthly Linux Game Awards: The list of nominees is again quite interesting, so choose your favorite. This months winner was 0 A.D. by the way... I guess we need to increase the promotion efforts a bit in case you weren't aware...

Quietly in the background a group of open-source and Linux enthusiast websites (full disclosure: including FreeGamer ;) ) has developed a new platform for promoting open-source games: http://www.linuxgameawards.org/ One of its regular features will be a monthly award and a related promotion drive for the winner on all affiliated sites. As a start, our community came up with the first 10 nominees for the January 2014 award and you can now vote for your favorite game of those here . P.S.: One of the nominated projects, SuperTuxKart, had a new release today also. Don't forget to check it out and vote for them if you like it.

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...