My Games Design

Great news for the FOSS enthusiasts: after many years of constant nagging the latest release of the great parcour/arena FPS Warsow has now most of it's artistic content under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 license (with a few remaining but clearly marked ones under CC-by-ND). Also updated particle effects in Warsow 2.0 You can find more screen-shots in the above link and the full changelog here . Rendering speed was also increased (claimed to be 30-50% faster) and a movement tutorial is now included. So far I always recommended Xonotic over Warsow as the coolest (=most competitive; Red Eclipse is also cool, but much more casual) open-source arena FPS, but I think I might reconsider this now... Happy fragging :p

For those that are not keeping up to the latest development branch ( via the autobuilds ), the Xonotic developers have released a new version with various smaller changes and new official maps. From the user "Antibody" ( known for his duel commentary videos ) comes this nice video overview of the new features: (please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings) On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread . Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily fo...

Galaxy Forces is an open-source moon lander shooter single-/multiplayer game hosted on SourceForge, it is nearly finished. It is unique of its kind in offering global hiscores and achievements. Replays and AI enemies also available. Try it . It plays on Win, Mac and Linux.

The very innovative and awesome looking (+ fully FOSS) multiplayer FPS Terminal-Overload got a new release today . Edit: By now there is actually already a 0.4.0 release, get it here . Charged x-jump on the new ETH5 map (3rd person camera turned on) One of the new features is a charged jump that lets one take big leaps to reach good sniping spots or evade an enemy etc. Other changes for this release: - New map: ETH5 - Prettier GUI - Replace re-jumping with instant & charged x-jump. - Tweak CAT movement speeds. - Simplify disc controls. - ETH mode: Each class only has one type of offensive disc. - SMG changes: Increase firing rate, decrease damage, shorter range. - MGL changes: Remove recoil, decrease firing rate, fire only one projectile. - MG changes: Projectiles are affected by gravity. ...

You might remember the crowd-sourcing campaign from the beginning of this year to make a fully FOSS remake of a rather unique game. Well, a bit later than promised, but really awesome never the less: Note that this is a really early alpha and most of the art still has placeholder quality. It is quite playable multiplayer game already though, and there is a Linux and a Windows version for download on their website . Please don't forget to give feedback on our forums (also if you are interested in helping out). This is by the way to my knowledge the first FOSS game utilizing the open-sourced version of the Torque3D engine and also the only one that uses the work in progress Linux port so far.

Came across this seemingly fun little game over here , too bad I don't have a Occulus Rift (yet): Check their page for the Win32 and browser server/client download.

Given the often quite small online communities around FOSS games, one has to become creative on how to keep players and attract new ones. Regular tournaments are one of those good ideas, albeit one that is a lot of work organizing. One of the games that is still struggling to attract a stable player base is Unvanquished , even though the game is based on Tremulous and thus quite well developed game-play wise. Don't hide from the Aliens However for those complaining about it being the "same old" just with fancy graphics, they have implemented an all new resource and base building system, which will be also used in the tournament! To quote them: Your tactics may need to change to compensate for this, but you can always test out the new gameplay on our development server beforehand, as well as by attending and observing our weekly development games on Saturdays. An explanation of the differences between our gameplay and the classic Tremulous variety will be explained in...

After an agonizingly long wait, I am happy to report that a new official release of the premier FOSS arena FPS Xonotic is available to the masses. Here is a nice (but slightly older) game-play video for those not having played Xonotic yet: Changes are quite extensive compared to the last official release... most notably an extensive update the the CTF mode , some neat additional features for competitive gaming and an assortment of great new maps. New maps in Xonotic 0.7 On the technical side of things, the engine DarkPlaces got quite a few performance improvements (mainly due to the fact that the creator now works at Valve software and thus has direct access to Nvidia's and AMD's graphics hardware divisions) and that an all new script compiler is now in use. That it runs on SDL 2.0 might also increase it's usability a lot for some. There are also finally an animation bending feature for the player-models and creation of new characters has never been easier now that the i...

Everyone's favorite clone of worm-warfare , Hedgewars recently got a rather big new release as one of the developers pointed out to us by email. One of the new level themes for Hedgewars 0.9.19 The changes are quite extensive, so instead of failing to summarize them here, check out the above linked quite extensive original release announcement. You can also have a look at this fan-made trailer if you enjoy cheezy stuff ;)

Here is another post about a project I found in the far ends of the internet ("here be dragons"), but which seems really promising never the less. But first of all a disclamer by the original creator: The screenshots you are about to see are not yet an eye candy, they're rather to be seen as a 'proof of concept' with lots of crappy placeholders. Work so far has mainly been done on the internal mechanics of game handling such as object interaction (player can carry gun which again can 'carry' a mag and the like), realistic calculation of trajectories, hit testing etc. So what am I talking about? A (most likely) open-source Operation Flashpoint type of game running on the Irrlicht engine with the current working title OpenFlashpoint: All there is so far is a thread on the Irrlich forums (with a few more details and development screenshots) and sadly the main developer seems to be bogged down by "real-life" ATM. But it seems like a worthwhil...

Both 0 A.D. and Unknown Horizons experience a change in leadership! For 0 A.D., Erik Johansson steps down from project leadership and Michael D. Hafer assumes that role. In Unknown Horizons, Nightraven steps back and Kilian fills the project management role. Leadership in free and open source game projects is an exciting topic with much opinion about which style will lead to a successful game - whatever the subject's definition of "success" is - and too few examples to make objective statements about it. Are you following any specific projects and their leadership structures an want to comment on these? I must admit that I am out of the loop with many, many projects, although I am pretty sure that for example Flare , NAEV and Valyria Tear have (successful)  Benevolent Dictator for Life style leadership. On related note: FIFE (the isometric 2d engine used by Unknown Horizons) moved to GitHub.

Good news is that the long awaited Red Eclipse version 1.4 was released yesterday. Read the announcement (with full change-log) here . Besides general polish the most notable features are: Vanity items and improved colours: dress up and frag with style. Visible legs in first person: know where you are kicking and parkouring. New and revamped maps: bringing you even more variety. Better viewing: level flythroughs, improved third and first person cameras. Better menus and other HUD elements: easier to see and read at a glance. New weapon: Mines add a new dimension to the existing gameplay. New mode: attack and defend in Gauntlet, competing for the most laps. Automatic demo recording: for those times you just have to watch it again. User Accounts: donate or contribute, and wear the in-game supporter badge. Improved weapon balance and gameplay rules, bugs fixed, and much more. Especially the visible legs in 1st person view add to the parcour movements and overall the game feels...

Defending your outpost in Shunned Survivor Shunned Survivor Commentary Video Shunned Survivor  is one of the entries for PyWeek #15 September 2012 "One Way Trip". In the genre mix between MMORTS , city building, economy simulation and tower defense game, you control an exiled human, with the apparent goal to get back to earth. The interaction with other players is quite indirect. You can attack other player's bases and win the "data" resource this way, which you need to perform "research" actions. However, defeating a base does not change it, you simply get the reward and can attack again. Shunned Survivor Server map While researching, however, you need to perform in a tower defense minigame, during which your defensive towers can be destroyed. If you succeed, the research was successful. If not, you have to enforce your defenses and try again. Even though quite a bit of the gameplay time is spent on waiting for resources to be generated by the variou...

SNiS Engineering screen Stephen Cameron, one of my personal heroes of game development ( Be The Wumpus ), made Word War Vi support color laser projectors using the openlase library [ blog post ]. Word War vi driving RGB color laser projector with openlaser Another project that our forum users were allowed to follow in this thread is Space Nerds in Space: So this game (when it becomes a game) is very much inspired by Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator See: artemis.eochu.com The idea is you have a game which is played much as the actors in the Star Trek TV series played their roles on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. There are a number of "stations": Navigation, Weapons, Science, Communications, etc. and each player assumes that role. Each station has it's own laptop or other computer which communicates via network to a central server which simulates the game universe. So it's kind of a cooperative multiplayer network game... No reason not to have multiple team...

I have outed myself previously as not a big Minecraft fan, so take everything in this post with a grain of salt (as I obviously don't really understand that genre). Anyways... recently this sub-reddit for open-source games was pointed out in our forums, and while it isn't really as lively as others (for example the Linux gaming one ) it pointed out an new project called Iceball : Pre-alpha Iceball screenshot Seemingly made by people not happy with the recent commercialization of Ace of Spades , it's an all FOSS remake, those early development you can follow here (or on their Github page ). Now maybe the graphics are lacking on purpose (see disclaimer above), but I couldn't help to think: why for f***'s sake did they have to reinvent the wheel with their own engine instead of using for example Terasology : Or Minetest , or the Ardorcraft API for that matter??? Ahh well, at least it made me aware that Terasology is still very much under development, and with its f...