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Great news for HTML5 game developers: a few days ago Superpowers was released under the ISC license.

What is Superpowers? A game development platform (an integrated editor but you can collaborate in realtime online; how cool is that! :D ) for making HTML5 games using TypeScript (a superset of Javascript). But you will also be able to work with other languages, so far support for the well known LÖVE2D is available.

Learn more in this video:


The source is available here and there is also an repository with a few sample games. If you like what they are doing, please consider becoming a supporter.

Looking forward to your new HTML5 games!

Lasers, rockets, shields, health regeneration, pixels. You know. The good stuff. Just nicely packaged with levels of just the right duration and hardness, persistent upgrades, shaders, reverb...

Two buttons are enough to play, since that was one of the themes of Ludum Dare #34, in which the game came #74 among 1638 jam entries.


Supser Space Invader was made with LÖVE (v0.9) and thus runs on Linux, OS X, Windows.

The source is available on GitHub under zlib/libpng.

Great news for people who like GGGGames ;)

The author of the new action roguelike dungeon crawler kind of darwen mayham game Gorynlich was so kind to inform us his game. It comes with this funny trailer (and some great programmer's art :p ):



The code is licensed under the LGPL, while the assets are only freeware right now. But the author seems to be open to look into replacing the assets with Creative Commons licensed ones if someone is interested in doing so.
Gorynlich is done by the same author as the ASCII game Goblin Hack by the way.

Another nice game starting with G, is the awesome remake of the oldie Megalomania, appropriately called Gigalomania!


The author is still looking for improved art asset contributions, but the game itself is already quite playable (even on mobile devices and a bunch of other rare systems!). Also check out the other two cool games by the same developer: Erebus RPG and Conquests (a Civ like game).
Purely by chance, I found an obviously abandoned but still fun to play mini tower defense with a skippable tutorial level and two playable missions, beautiful graphics and performance settings.

To be a master is to spam en mass

So you place towers and the shoot enemies that move towards your base. I know this! Being an impatient player type, I skipped past the tutorial and was annihilated in level 1.

Short enough messages in a hard enough tutorial level

The degree of my destruction was such, that I was thankful for the tutorial being there at all. Even though I did die in it, it taught me enough about the all-or-nothing early game (which some might refer as to "unbalanced") to get my strategy right.

Turn off for speed. Turn on for awesome!

You get 3 towers: that allows you to build more tower, one that allows you to shoot more and one that shoots. You can block paths and create mazes. There are no tower upgrades and that's okay.

All the plot. Space to continue. Take that non-skip-able intro video AAA games!

Mission #3 is not possible to win (prove me wrong) but it was a great experience to find that I was able to beat the tutorial mission after all. By deviating from the given instructions! If that's not freedom (besides being open source) then I don't know what is!

Yeah right...

Come to think of it, the ridiculousness of level 3 practically speaks "dear player, you should totally fork and make new levels!"

Made with love2d

The last commit to Turres Monacorum was in May 2014 and the game was made at a game jam. My experience dictates that this won't be picked up by the original developers any more but to any player with love2d installed, it will come as a wonderful, visually polished snack!

Download the mini tower defense game from the github release page and enjoy!

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 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 documentation.

Code License: GPLv2
Content License: Unclear

Valyria Tear: "Final Release of Half-Episode I"

New Valyria Tear GUI screens

Valyria Tear Half-Episode I has been released, which I suppose we can take as 50% of Episode I's acts being complete.

The release brings new graphical interfaces and development is ongoing.

An OS X version can now also be grabbed from the OSX thread.

Code License: GPLv2
Content License: Various (DFSG approved)


Physica screenshots


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 0.21.0 has been released. Changelog:
  • Various dialogue, trading, and disposition fixes and improvements
  • Torch flickering improved to better match vanilla Morrowind
  • Fix for attribute fluctuation when infected with Ash Woe Blight
  • Adjusted activation range to better match vanilla Morrowind
  • Fixes for the Journal UI
  • Fixed crash caused by Golden Saint models
  • Fix for beast races being able to wear shoes
  • Fix for background music not playing
  • Fix for meshes without certain node names not being loaded
  • Fix for incorrect terrain shape on inital cell load
  • Fix for MWGui::InventoryWindow creating a duplicate player actor at the origin
  • Added video playback
  • Added support for escape sequences in message box and dialogue text
  • Added AI related script functions, note that AI is not functional yet
  • Implemented fallbacks for necessary ini values in the importer, unused in OpenMW as of yet
  • Implemented execution of scripts of objects in containers/inventories in active cells
  • Cell loading performance improvements
  • Removed broken GMST contamination fixing mechanism
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].


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 teams in multiple starships inhabiting the same server/universe either cooperating or doing battle.
Mine is different than Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator in that it is:
GPL'ed.
Linux/gtk
Probably uglier (lol).
Probably more scalable (yay vector graphics.)
Not even close to finished.


It will probably be a while until I'm in a room with enough Linux users to test play this game but when the time comes, I shall be prepared!
I totally missed the rather big update of Unknown Horizons at the end of last month. The changes/updates are summarized by them as following:
  • Completely new tileset
  • New buildings: alvearies, barracks, blender, cocoa field, doctor, herbary, lookout, pastry shop, spice field, vineyard, vintner
  • Many new graphics for existing buildings
  • AI can now handle war and diplomacy
  • Vast performance improvements
  • New music track: Battle
  • Tons of bug fixes
  • Updated translations
  • Much, much more
Yesterday there was also a new 0.7.0 release of the 3D Worldforge client Ember:
Worldforge 3D client Ember 0.7.0
Graphics are starting to look rather nice, right?

Last but not least,the recently open-sourced AgentKeeper got a dedicated sub-forum on our messageboards and is looking for contributors:



So, if you want to help out with this brand new jMonkey powered dungeon tycoon game, check out this nice list of video tutorials.
First off as a rather fast follow up on the last post:
Otherwise, as previously mentioned, Garage Games has now also released their 2D game framework under the MIT license:



Their 3D game engine also saw some nice updates lately, however sadly their crowd funding push to port Torque3D to Linux fell (not totally unsurprisingly) short of their 30,000$ mark (with about 10,000$ pledged).
Happy new year everyone!

So today I found out about this really cool project to improve the graphics of the open-source (with freeware media) classic Ur-Quan Masters (aka Star Control 2):



Having played the SD version back in the day on my GP2X handheld (and it seems to be available for Android nowadays too ;) ), I can assure you that the game holds up very well to today's standards, with a really cool and funny story and awesome voice acting. Higher resolution graphics thus can only make it better ;)

So, NO excuses now... give it a try!
Losing in Gigalomania

Gigalomania [blog] is an open source 2D Real Time Strategy game, for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Nokia smartphones (Symbian, Maemo and Meego). The gameplay consists of researching and developing new technology with which to conquer your enemies, from rocks and sticks to nuclear weapons and spaceships. You can advance through ten different ages, from the stone age to the future. There are 28 different maps to play through.

CTruck3D

CTruck3D is a simple-looking OpenGL truck simulator.

term_CTruck3D

There is an ASCII-Art variant called term_CTruck3D.

EDIT: What's quite interesting about the game is the marketing(?). Two YouTube accounts seem to be quite excited about the game: simhgamedev and violinperforming.
A thread called "Post your Open Source Game" on the gamedev subreddit let me discover some new and old projects.

Here are three of them:

Zolo

A hyperactively fast jump and run with chainsaws: Zolo.

Food Fight

An OGRE-based real time strategy with vegetables and taco: Food Fight.

GameLV

An "adventure game in a post-soviet environment": GameLV.
Please bear with me for the duration of this post.

Медвед

BearGame игра про медведя прыгуящим на воздушных шарах. Актуальная альфа-версия была написана в Java.

  
видео: BearGame

Plee le Porter

BearGame n'est pas le seul jeu avec un ours. Par exemple, Plee The Bear est un jeu avec un ours comme personnage principal.

Neues Pac-Bär Logo

Des weiteren habe ich letztens das Logo für eine Berliner Hobbyspielentwicklergruppe namens Berlin Mini Jam überarbeitet. Dies hat nicht direkt was mit open source Spielen zu tun, aber einige von uns mögen die offene Soße und stellen unsere Spiele unter freien Lizenzen zur verfügung.

Thanks for Bearing!
Synchronized shooting in Mass Blaster
Mass Blaster is one of the most intense arcade shooters for Windows and Linux. You will take control of two ships simultaneously to blast away at the invading Square Army. On your left, take down enemies with the red n' rad Trigerus. On your right, command the cool blue Pythagora to wipe out your foes. Choose from 4 modes of difficulty to fight your way through 10 gutsy levels. Only those with the skills to pilot both ships at the same time will go on to become High Score Heroes.

This game shares a vein with games like Avoision and pumps adrenaline. Intended for one player, Mass Blaster plays superb with two pilots as well. Just get a keyboard emulator and a joystick to avoid key locking.

Code is under GPL, while all other assets are under the not-so-free CC-BY-NC.

Traction Edge is a story driven, turn based strategy game set in a Steampunk Victorian England. Gameplay is similar to the Gollop Brothers UFO or Lasersquad series in that you have "Action Points" to spend during your turn. The game also borrows heavily from roguelikes in both look and feel.

Traction Edge is currently under development and is considered alpha software. It is playable but limited. v0.2 was released for the Annual Roguelike Release Party 2011. It is distributed as source only and requires SFML 1.6 (not 2.0) and cmake to build.

Current Features:
  • Turn based gameplay
  • 2-4 member squad teams
  • Destructable terrain
  • Victorian Steampunk setting
  • SFML based, rescalable on the fly, 16x16 graphical tiles.
Planned Features:
  • 16-20 static levels with full story arc
  • Random content, procedural maps
  • Procedural tech tree
  • Civilians
  • Z-levels

You can keep track of all development activity using this feed. The Linux distro that I use doesn't support SFM 1.6 any more, which makes me unable to test this interesting sounding and looking squad tactics game.

Wizznic! received more GUI enhancements [video (00:57@YouTube)]
TORCS 1.3.2 brings menu music into the game [.ogg (05:50/7.1MB)]
Knights 0.19 features deathmatch [description]
Humm and Strumm is an in-dev co-op game engine [design .pdf (156kB)]
SuperTux' level contest has four entries so far [submission thread]
Wizznic!

Wizznic! supports mouse & touchscreen. [Video] Code available on GitHub.

MeAndMyShadow

MeAndMyShadow 0.2rc1 is out. It features tutorial, in-game help, a new default visual style and an improved editor.


Epiar 0.5.0 has been released:
  • UI clean-up
  • Expanded missions system
  • Sound and music additions
  • Main menu
  • Editor greatly expanded
  • Misc. bug fixes
GemRB logo

GemRB 0.7.0 was released recently. Their wiki received a clean-up as well. The engine re-implementation runs on Android and iOS. BG, TotSC, BGII, ToB, IWD and HoW can be played start to end. Some features are missing and there are some new features too.
Posted Image
Two 'towers' down in MiniMek Urbie Defense

A little top-down defense game was released under GPL (art & code) as a new year's present. It shows nicely, how libre art can be used for small game programming projects.
These use some art assets from megamek (http://megamek.info/) and therefore these games are also licensed under the GPL 
A straightforward interpretation of the GPL applied to assets. I'm afraid though, the images of MegaMek might be incompatible with the GPL, due to Battletech copyright and/or trademark.

The game has good performance but little complexity except for a Missile Commander-esque twist: getting hit reduces player's spacial ability to shoot.

According to the project page, more games with the same graphical theme are to be expected. I'm looking forward to them!


Hale RPG
A very fine read is this review of the TBS/RPG Hale. Its first comment was written by the sole developer.


Flare 0.15 introduces outdoor areas. Translation submissions are welcome now as well. Look for instructions and examples in this post.



Freedroid RPG recently released the second candidate for 0.15. Soon it will be ten years since registration of the freedroid project on SourceFroge.net.



Checking on Scourge 2, another open source RPG title, there has been no development for eight months.

Search for Smodrick 1.3.1, a simple ncurses-based game, was recently uploaded to SourceForge.

Nearly dead in Search for Smodrick 1.3.1


The gameplay consists of finding an optimal path to get to the next level and avoiding/deflecting enemy androids. Game turns appear to be mixed-real/turn-based

No monsters yet in this match of Black Obelisk 0.2

I was reminded of the JavaScript game Black Obelisk by Starinfidel, in which your task is to destroy hidden obelisks while avoiding or luring deadly monsters. Hint: input is via mouse and you start playing by pressing black tiles next to non-black tiles.

Both games are single-player puzzles with minimal visuals.