clair012

Ancient Beast 0.3 is here ( blog post , forum announcement )! This gorgeously drawn game makes another step towards the vision of its developers. Heya! It’s been too long since the last release, about 3 years; long time indeed. We’ve finally repaired the prototype and added several new playable creatures, along with more features, goodies and bug fixes, not to mention that all the old units have been pretty much revamped. A ton of work, but it was totally worth it! Ancient Beast is a player vs player turn based strategy game played online where you command all manner of creatures (3D printed! Beware the power of playing God!) in a battle for supremacy amongst the ruins of the apocolypse. Or something like that. Sounds fun. :) Ancient Beast 0.3 Deceiver (formerly "The Yearning") has been rebranded in its latest update . GPL licensed code is available on github, and there's a steady history of updates going back 2 years, but the assets remain copyright of the developer. ...

Lugaru HD , aka OSS Lugaru, is now fully freely licensed. November 30th, 2016, the license was changed to state that all Wolfire assets are CC-BY-SA 3.0 licensed. Two weeks later, version 1.1 was released. My favorite change: modern screen resolutions (e.g. 1080p) are now supported! 1.1 Highlights - Multiple campaigns support, making it easier to install and play mods! - These Lugaru mods are included by default as alternative to the Turner official campaign: -- Temple, by Silb -- Empire, by Jendraz -- The Seven Tasks, by Philtron R. (albeit with some engine-related issues) - All assets (animations, textures, models, maps, sounds, etc.) of Lugaru HD by Wolfire are under a free and open source license (CC-BY-SA 3.0)! - Window and input management ported from SDL 1.2 to SDL 2.0, improving the support for modern screen resolutions and fullscreen mode, as well as better input handling. The bunny melee fighting game is hard to learn but once you figure out the controls, you can sear t...

Hexoshi ( forum thread ) is a libre game generally inspired by the Metroid series, notably the older versions. It is seeking funding using CrowdSupply for a budget of at least $1100 to achieve "Milestone 1" which involves fleshing out the first world of the game, including new enemies, player abilities, and 30-40 rooms, and the graphics for it all (which seems to be the bulk of the funding requirement). It already looks quite well done, even though it is in the early stages of development. Smooth animations, accurate and responsive movement, and fun music all make it quite a compelling game and something the FOSS game scene doesn't really have. Hexoshi is developed by Julie Merchant, aka onpon4 on the FreeGameDev forums. It is written in Python and SGE . Julie/onpon4 also developed ReTux ( forum thread ) - a project that received less credit than it deserved, likely because it looked so similar to SuperTux due to re-using graphics from the classic FOSS platformer. In m...

Assorted news from the vast realm of open-source FPS games: Sadly Warsow , despite recentish good news of open asset re-licensing, seems to have come to an end, with the lead engine developer stepping down and general chaos in its wake. Initially I thought it would sort itself out somehow, but after a few months things look still bad. And an forking attempt also seems to have fizzled. So, maybe YOUR chance to step up and take over a brand new fork? It includes nice relatively unknown game modes similar to Team Fortress and Counterstrike "bombing", so one could try to refocus and re-brand everything. Maybe old news, but it seems people finally got sick of the lack of development and restricting assets licenses of Sauerbraten , and decided to start a nice fork called Inexor. From the looks of it, engine development is quite active and new asset licensing should make the result fully FOSS. They even plan to back-port some nice stuff from Tesseract (sadly also very low prof...

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...

Gosh that tumbleweed is clogging up the blog! I logged into github today and saw this highly active project in my feed called The Yearning .  A hybrid singleplayer / multiplayer game about spider drones and the meaning of life. If that doesn't mean too much to you (it didn't to me!) then fortunately you can check out this gif of some gameplay.  Lots of other projects continue on strongly. Then there's others that need a bit of TLC. Somebody is having a bit of a go with reviving Open City , which could hopefully lead to making it a bigger project with more contributors later down the line. Then there's somebody reviving Lips of Suna . That's the great thing about open source - there's always a chance somebody is interested enough to take on the mantle should the original developer move on to other things.

Great news from our friends of the SuperTuxKart project! Read all the details on their latest blog-post here . They also made a nice new trailer showing off a more unusual game-mode: Clearly this project has come a long way and looks better with every release! So grab your copy over at their fancy new website .