My Games Design

The Godot Engine ("the open-source answer to Unity3D") continues to make exciting progress with the recent stable release of version 2.1 . Besides lots of small usability improvements to the GUI, the main new feature is a asset sharing store build right into the editor: This should hopefully result in a lot of extremely easy to use assets, and I am looking forward to seeing a lot high quality assets from OpenGameArt.org transferred into it ;) In related news, it was recently announced that there is work going on to allow C# (a extremely popular game scripting language also used in Unity3D) scripting in Godot besides the current Python based custom language. So this should lower the entry barrier for indie developers significantly, and maybe we will even see a conversion utility for open-sourcing simple Unity3D games? Furthermore they are also working on a visual scripting system akin to Unreal's Blueprint or what you can use in the Blender Game Engine. Yeah, visual pro...

First off (and you probably read it elsewhere before): The awesome Godot game engine got a really awesome 2.0 release a few weeks ago. It also got independent of it's original developers (who stay active in development), and the first larger commercial game with it was released on Steam just a few days ago. Fresh of the press is a FOSS release of an pretty awesome competitor though: The Atomic Game Engine was just released fully under the MIT license ! Its render engine is a fork of the pretty nice Urho3D renderer, but it includes an cross-platform integrated development environment similar to Godot: Looks nice, but where is the Linux binary release? :( Dive into the source code here . Similar to Godot it features some neat platform support: Linux, Android, WebGL, Windows, iOS and OSX (resorted for significance ;) ); but unlike it you have much more and more common scripting languages at your disposal: JavaScript, TypeScript, C++, and C# scripting in the works. Especially the l...

Great news for HTML5 game developers: a few days ago Superpowers was released under the ISC license . What is Superpowers? A game development platform (an integrated editor but you can collaborate in realtime online; how cool is that! :D ) for making HTML5 games using TypeScript (a superset of Javascript) . But you will also be able to work with other languages, so far support for the well known L�VE2D is available . Learn more in this video: The source is available here and there is also an repository with a few sample games . If you like what they are doing, please consider becoming a supporter . Looking forward to your new HTML5 games!

The joys of programming - hours spent scratching one's head whilst trying to figure out why the seemingly correct code does not produce correct results. Hi, Charlie here. I used to post often. Where was I? Ah, yes, this nugget of brain fudgery from the VDrift forums posted by NaN: So I've spent some time today try to figure out why cars are still flying off in random directions when hitting curbs sometimes. It turns out it is a bug in Bullet, to be more specific in the SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD macro. Code: #define SIMD_PI           btScalar(3.1415926535897932384626433832795029) #define SIMD_2_PI         btScalar(2.0) * SIMD_PI #define SIMD_HALF_PI      (SIMD_PI * btScalar(0.5)) #define SIMD_RADS_PER_DEG (SIMD_2_PI / btScalar(360.0)) #define SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD  (btScalar(360.0) / SIMD_2_PI) The first one to spot it gets a virtual cookie. For the answer visit the thr...

Thanks to GamingOnLinux for pointing out that this crossplattform *no-programming* 2D game development suite has gone fully FOSS. It can export games to HTML5 and native code (x86 Linux and Windows). Read the original announcement here . The github repository is here . License infos: The IDE (in the IDE folder) is licensed with GPL v3.  The Core library, the native and HTML5 platforms (respectively Core, GDCpp and GDJS folders) are LGPL v3.  Extensions (in the Extensions folder) are using zlib/libpng license.  The name, Game Develop, and its logo are the exclusive property of Florian Rival. Here is a small video to get you started: & you can find some example games here . ---- By the way: I also recommend to have another look at the Godot engine which has had many improvements since it became open-source a few months ago.

I tend to focus a bit on the 3D side of things, but the recently open-sourced Torque2D (note the "2") engine is pretty cool too: And in fact it got a whole lot better in the last couple of weeks with it being ported to Linux , Android and your browser (through Mozilla's emscripten ). So if you are thinking about developing an open-source 2D game targeting multiple platforms, Torque2D has just became a serious contender.

The maybe most user friendly and complete FOSS game engine jMonkey Engine 3 , has recently released the final version 3.0 of their very nice SDK . Here is a list of the full changes: Engine - LWJGL base now works on MacOSX 10.7+ incl. Applets - Hardware Skinning - Shader Nodes - Better Character (beta) -  New LOD Generator! -  TangentBinormalGenerator was refactored - Better physics debug view SDK - Now bundles a compatible version of the JDK - Now bundles a version of Blender for conversion and more - Shader Node Editor (!) - Code completion for assets - Texture Atlas creation and packed texture handling - External editor mesh updates for j3o files - Seamless 3DS and Collada import through blender - Improvements to model import tool, allows to locate and import textures - Attach custom AppStates to the SDK editor scene - New help and error log system, look for the monkey in the bottom right! - Improved Font Importer - Improved support for using other IDEs for code - Improved...

An interesting mixture to "pay what you want" and "ransom funding" has recently surfaced with the Open Bundle : You can buy all the offered game art and use them under the CC-by license and if the total threshold is reached (10k, 1 day remaining, 9.3k already pledged) all the game art (2d sprites and music) will be officially released under the CC0. A split of the funds is btw. shared with the EFF and Creative Commons . For those wondering: no, it is not done by our friends of OpenGameArt.org , but they think it is a good project anyways . Interestingly the creator is also thinking of expanding the idea: Do you want to host your own "public domain ransom"? I'd love to help you! Email me at nick@commonly.cc P.S.: While we are on last day notices: Today ends the registration period for the Unvanquished summer tournament . Also check out their latest Alpha 17 .

In my never ending search for a FOSS game engine that is usable for game modding with out having to reinvent the wheel (nor requiring to be a C++ code master) & having decent tools for content creation (because I am spoiled and think that is a minimum requirement for a game engine) I have become quite disillusioned lately. That is because *spoiler alert* sadly there is none so far... but a few are close luckily. The usual contenders for 3D action games are your mixed assortment of idTech based engines, most notably ioQuake3 . There are a few upcoming contenders like Unvanquished's Daemon engine (which is a mix of ET:Wolf, ioQuake3 and Xreal) and a yet to emerge idTech4 based champion (my uninformed guess is that it will be dhewm3 ). But all of them lack a decent game-play scripting function. On the other side of the idTech spectrum, there is the idTech1 based granddaddy DarkPlaces , which while having advanced to an quite impressive feature set, suffers a quite a bit from its...

UPDATE: First set of files has been released (license CC0) and on my advise he added some stretch goals: 600$ > 3 game ready Enemies! (models, sfx, animations, effects) 650$ > Dynamic optimized lighting system! (rich dynamic lighting with low resource usage ) 750$ > 4 new weapons!(model, texture, sound) 850$ > Triple the amount of the actual props! (interactive objects,explosibles, new walls, doors windows etc.) 900$ > New player model (model, textures) Currently it is standing at 530$ and there are 22 days to go, so chances are we will see some more nice stuff out of this. ------------ Way too many closed-source game projects never see the light of the day, and their code and assets are forever lost. Now at least one developer thought he could at least make a few bucks by liberating this content under the CC0 license: There is some seriously nice stuff in that pack, and the 500 US $ he is asking for on his indigogo page is a bargain for it. At the time of writing thi...

Hey folks! Just a quick note.  I'm looking to fund work on OpenGameArt.org full time (probably via Kickstarter or similar) once my current work project is done, and I'm interested in hearing what people would like me to work on.  If you have any thoughts, please join the discussion on OGA: http://opengameart.org/content/if-i-could-work-on-oga-full-time-what-would-people-want-me-to-code-or-do ...or on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1d11ir/i_run_opengameartorg_and_im_looking_at_options_to/ Thanks! Bart

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...