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Showing posts from February, 2013

Winter Shorts 3: PyWeek #16 in April, Rainbow Rooms, Valyria Tear on OS X

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PyWeek #16 in April PyWeek logo PyWeek is a game jam that obviously goes on for one week and requires the use of Python. It takes place online and there are overall winners in team and solo categories, as well as awards. The dates of the 16th PyWeek challenge are 00:00 UTC April 14, 2013 to 00:00 UTC April 21, 2013. Registration opens on 15. March 2013. There is a message board for the community and there are interesting methods to publish Python games as HTML/JavaScript using pyjs , as demonstrated by the PyWeek #15 entry  Kaos . License Requirements : At least Shared Source required . Free software licenses recommended. PyWeek #15 Entry: Rainbow Rooms Rainbow Rooms Video Rainbow Rooms is a physical-nonsense-maze puzzle game based on libtcod . Various fonts are being used, some of which might be problematic license-wise for including in for example Debian's official repositories but it should be possible to replace them in less than two hours including research and documen...

Asylum: Free-as-in-Freedom Horror Adventure, Successfully Crowd-Funded

This is a guest post by Hythlodaeus on an interesting FLOSS game engine project, being developed by a professional games company. ASYLUM video I guess I should take a few paragraphs on this article to explain my stance on crowd-funded game projects. I've always been turned off by most Kickstarter game projects for a very simple reason: after personally inquiring a plethora of developers on their stance for Open-Source and Free Software, I was generally met with negative replies, half-baked excuses, bitter retorts or complete silence. Now, although I recognize it is every developer's right to pick the license and the conditions for the usage of their own work, it strikes me as a very odd attitude for people engaging into crowd funding projects to be so unwilling to provide any other warranties to their prospective backers and future customers other than “we will make this happen if you give us enough money”. From this point, let's make something clear: pledging on a crowd-f...

Winter Shorts 2: Physica, SkyRiot, OpenMW

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Physica screenshots Let's play Physica - a hard casual platformer game played on Linux Physica is a very simple casual platformer game where the goal is to drive a square through game levels from its starting position to his goal, avoiding hazards and without falling down. SkyRiot screens SkyRiot is available for free for Android on Google Play  and was released under open source and free content licenses on SourceForge.net [ forum post ]. SkyRiot is a 2D flying shooting platform action game for Android devices. Fly a hoverboard and use an assortment of weaponry as you, an anarchist, single-handedly wage war against a totalitarian regime. Full 360-degree aiming along with total freedom of movement will keep you glued to your device for many hours as you blast your way across over 10 game maps. OpenMW v0.21.0 Commentary OpenMW  0.21.0 has been released. Changelog: Various dialogue, trading, and disposition fixes and improvements Torch flickering improved to better match vanil...

Winter Shorts 1: Word War Vi Laser Edition, Space Nerds in Space

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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...

Cube2 engine keeps on expanding!

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While the recent new release of Cube2: Sauerbraten didn't bring any really big changes, the network of friendly forks keeps expanding. But before I go into more details, here is a new feature trailer of Cube2: Sauerbraten: The maybe most prominent and fully FOSS fork RedEclipse is still working on the promised new 1.4 release, with them doing some silly and some cool enhancement projects in the meantime... so yeah: Red Eclipse in Valve Time tm Octaforge still has a few day to go in order to avoid missing their estimated release "this month", but when browsing OpenGameArt.org, I came across an interesting fork of the Sandbox Game Maker fork, called Lamiae with the RPG game Kelgar : Kelgar Gameplay 0.8 - Indie DB According to their github page, content seems to be libre (CC-by or CC-by-SA) but information is a bit scarce. Even less information is available for this other fork, called SabiCube , but you can download and test their alpha. Oh and a bit older, but also ...