My Games Design

A couple of long standing open source game projects have received significant updates. OpenDungeons , an open source dungeon management game, has seen release 0.6 make it out the door. Release highlights from the changelog : New spell logic with cooldown, targets and cost management Fancy new spells: Heal, Explosion and Haste Particle effects! Reworked library logic and made research order configurable New creature overlays that show the creatures' mood Customisable creature sound effects! Doors to better block enemies and macromanage allies In-game settings menu support! New claimed walls graphics and various other graphical improvements New minimap camera with real-time rendering Dedicated server support with command-line parameters There's plenty of screenshots in the announcement on the frontpage of the OpenDungeons website (but no direct link for the announcement, frustratingly).     Explosions! Spells! The research tree The project has some very regular contributors...

I'm a big advocate of the phrase, "Release Early, Release Often." I think it is by far the best way to keep or gain community interest in a project. Of course, that simple phrase doesn't quite sum up what you actually must do - simply uploading a release and announcing it on your mailing list is unlikely to attract interest. For example, who knew about Lincity-NG 2.9beta in lieu of the intended Lincity-NG 3.0 ? Lincity-NG is in a bit of a mini-crisis. A victim of the shutdown of the Berlios developer services , all the web material is in a bit of a mess. Its home page is now on fedorahosted.org but still links back to the defunct Berlios page. There are entries on Google Code and Github that are up to date with the source, as well as an imported Sourceforge project * which is the only place you can currently find the beta , however all are unofficial / back up for now. (* Not to be confused with this redundant redundant project ) Another game project which suffer...