Unnamed Game
This as-yet-unnamed side scrolling game project looks awesome. It's open source, art and all, up on Sourceforge in SVN. You can see how beautiful it looks. I guess somebody (what, me?) should encourage them to package up a playable release. For now, it's labelled 'sawk' here on FG - the acronym for it's SF.net listing "Sidescrolling Action With Kid".
Theme Park Builder 3D is an ambitious effort to make a detailed Free Software theme park game. Which sounds great. Not so great is their web presence which centres around the TPB3D.net forum. Only you must register for before you can view it, which makes just casually looking at the development effort basically inconvenient, not to mention how hard it is to peruse. Forums do not good homepages make. They also have a wiki and their sourceforge project which tpb3d.com directs to. The forum refuses to let me back in (complaining that 'freegamer' has non-alphanumeric characters?) after I registered and pointed out this problem. So until things change I'm probably not going to be able to give an update on any TPB3D progress. They do seemed to have designed a lot of flat rides (youtubes) but no roller coasters yet, and certainly nothing close to a playable game. Still, a good one for theme park or Theme Park (I loved that game) enthusiasts.
Bloodmasters
Hey, Windows guys, go download Bloodmasters. Fast, furious fun. It's Free Software and C#. Hey Linux dudes and dudettes, go find some Mono expert to get it ported. I should mention this game more...
Tim "mithro" Ansell from the Thousand Parsec project got in touch recently:
...It is a framework (and games) for
building turn based space empire games. You can find out more at
http://www.thousandparsec.net/
We have recently been part of the Google Summer of Code and have written
up an announcement about the success of the project. You can find that
announcement here -
http://www.thousandparsec.net/tp/news.php/2008-10-16-1400...
In a follow up email he goes on to say:
At the moment I am actively trying to get more people to actually play
Thousand Parsec games. The lack of players is reducing the motivation to
do releases and fix bugs (instead of tinkering with some random
feature). It also means that the quality and quantity of our output can
be quite low.
Thousand Parsec
The thing is, TP is introduced (by him, by the TP website) as a game framework. As a player looking for a game to play, a framework is not that interesting to me. You can play TP, so it is a game, but I think they have a perception problem. For example, Freeciv is a game and a framework. But it's a game first, and then when you get drawn in, you see all the different tilesets and mods. TP needs to sort out it's image and have a default game that is presented first if they want to catch more players. People looking for a framework will find it just as easily.
Qubodup wants to switch off blogger comments - we got some spam lately - and simply have a link to the forum after each post. Opinions welcome.