PostMaker.Com

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.

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.

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.

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.