OGA challenges and snippets of games news

What you see here are the 2D/3D submission to the first three OpenGameArt 5-day game art challenges, which were initiated by pfunked, author of OSARE and active OGA artist.

Check out the general rules and the current challenge rules in its thread in this forum. You don't even need to register to participate, just remember to include your author information and the correct tags ("Friday Challenge" and "ChallengeTitle", separate via ",") to your submission!

The challenges/competitions last from Monday till Friday, so there are still a bunch of hours left to submit something to the current "Homage" challenge. :) This feed will keep you updated about new challenges.

The following is a preview of the four pieces of music submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)

And here are the sound effects submitted to the first three challenges. (.ogg)


By the way, Blendswap apparently will implement license selection soon. Since I mentioned my preference for their poll, "licenses" has been leading with ~30 votes. Thanks! This means that, depending on what licenses will be selectable, models on Blendswap will be usable by foss games.

The TORCS fork racing sim Speed Dreams (new website) seeks dev/art help for finishing the 2.0 release. The impression I get from taking a look at their commit history is that the project seems to be developing at a steady pace.

I discovered Pac Defence recently. I love this genre, but prefer the non-abstract implementations (PacDef is abstract) and the kind where you can use your towers to build mazes (in PacDef you build along the path). Here's a gameplay video for you. If you know of any foss maze/non-abstract TD games, please let me know! :)

I saw a video of FlightGear's urban effect and it looks awesome! If you enjoy these kind of videos, I can only recommend subscribing to planetacancun2 (author of the video) via YouTube profile or feed.

Violetland was tweaked a little, it has improved GUI and new pick-ups: bombs, bullet boosts, some pills which I don't know the effect of and the player has a teleport ability.

Epiar, the foss space action/trading game that is not naev had a dev chat meeting for planning the next version and is now looking for new developers and art submissions.

It feels good to post without embedding YT videos for a change. :)

Open Source RPGs coming up: Dawn RPG, OSARE, FreeDink, Hero of Allacrost, FoI

tinyogg

The future FOSS Diablo-and-more-like Open Source Action RPG Engine has an art style which I can approve of. (I do not approve of the Diablo-and-more-like FreeDroid RPG's art style.)

OSARE will be close to feature complete in Fall 2010.

I assume this means that it will be a working action rpg engine with enemies, items and skills, but no plot or story, ready to be turned into a game.

If you feel that you can contribute something matching high quality of this project, check out the tasks page!

login2download

Dawn has very nice graphics and a decent demo with items, a fetch quest, enemies and spells. It's hard to beat -- but easy to exploit, due to pathfinding/collision fun stuffs.

Communication seems to work via mailing lists.

There's a little list of things I don't like:

1. Slow walking speed (needs a run button)
2. Huge sprite masks/collision boxes
3. Two very Zelda™/Link®-like looking sprites..

tinyogg

Hero of Allacrost's release policy experiments result to a release early, release often philosophy.

There is a HoA subforum which is visible only to registered users, for discussion of the game's design. I find it irritating that a large part of discussions is hidden from non-registered lurkers, when it might attract participation. I wonder what other's think about such practice, which has also found its place in the DungeonHack project in this subforum, which is used for discussing a mini-plot/'module' called "Spider Forest". Please comment your experiences with partially hiding game dev discussions if you have any.

HoA also has forums that are developer-only, which feels very non-open to me (because it isn't :) ) but on the other hand the project is supposed to be 'closed' in the sense of 'dedicated developers instead of casual contributors'. What do you think about having part of the development hidden unless you 'promise' to become a dedicated developer?

Funnily enough, there are many projects which have 'closed' communication due to the simple fact that there are many users and developers who don't want to use mailing lists (in my opinion they are usually not usable for browsing, google groups should be acceptable for people used to forums, but GNU mailman is horrible in its default state, if you want to have an overview over existing threads.)

tinyogg

Fall of Imiryn: Hardly anything new about it. A few tweaks there and here in the svn.. If someone wants to test this, I'm looking into polishing the game so it can be 'finished' via a 'last' release. It is playable from start to end right now, but might be enhanced with a few content, without breaking any backs or endlessly continuing development. :) (suggestions welcome)

spoilers - tinyogg

The ..weird.. crazy action-RPG Dink Smallwood was released as open source (minus sounds and music) and is being developed as FreeDink.

I will try to spend some time for adding sfx to FreeDink - haven't started yet, even though I have quite the plan. I will use a github repository. Of course anybody is welcome to join in and there's probably nobody working on looking for music to add to FreeDink.

Hopefully there will be a 'full' release without missing audio soon.

Not a game, just an UI thought - gpl/bySa source - base

Let's have a little rant, shall we? X.org (the thing that makes Linux have graphics) often crashes, when a game force-fullscreens on me. This makes a sad qubodup D:. I wish games would have a 'select your video/audio configuration' window before game start or just start in windowed mode. :)

AI War and Zenith Remnant Bundle 50% Off This Weekend At Impulse

If you or someone you know is looking for a great deal on AI War and its
expansion... here's your chance! Today is the start of a Weekend
Impulse Buys promotion at Stardock's Impulse on the AI War /
Zenith Remnant Pack. The promotion runs through April 25th.

Tidalis 0.402 Released, OSX Updater Issues Resolved

The early days of the Tidalis beta have been a bit interesting, as one
of the first things we discovered was that our updater would actually
kill the OSX version of Tidalis during updates.  It was a Unix
permissions thing that we somehow didn't encounter in our prerelease
testing.  This took us days to solve in the end (more technical details here and here for
those curious), and so there have been fewer gameplay updates than we
would normally hope for during that period.




Even so, there have been a number of notable updates since the initial
0.400 launch, including:


* Adjustable keyboard bindings in the settings screen.


* New and updated advanced tutorials based on player feedback.


* Scoring tweaks, HUD improvements, and other bugfixes.


* More objective types and features for the level editor.


* Six new adventure levels, and tweaks to a number of existing
adventure levels.


* Revamped trial mode restrictions based on early player feedback
(no more overall time limit).





For the full release notes, please see the
0.401
and
0.402
topics. Normally we don't post
about minor releases in the main news forum (to keep up with minor
releases, see the
Tidalis
forum), but because of
the automatic-update-breaking nature of this particular release we
wanted to make sure that people knew about it.




A big thank-you, as always, is due to all of our early supporters and
those who have stopped by the forums to report bugs, provide feedback,
and so on.  We're really learning a lot from you all, including that the
most popular secondary gameplay modes seem not to be what we expected
they would be, for instance.  Despite the problems with the first round
of patches, the game itself has had surprisingly few issues for being so
early in beta, so we're really pleased about that.




Lots more exciting stuff is in the works!  Stay tuned tomorrow and
Friday (in the Tidalis forum) for more Tidalis releases that will come
out through the normal game-integrated channel.




If you don't yet have Tidalis:


You can download the demo (which alternately turns into the full
game with a preordered license key) from the Tidalis download
page.




If you already have Tidalis 0.400 or 0.401, full or demo:


You can download the Tidalis
0.402 manual windows patch.


You can download the Tidalis
0.402 manual mac osx patch.




Please note that if you changed the installation folder for Tidalis away
from the default, then you'll need to point the manual patch to the
custom location you previously chose.  It will simply point to the same
default location that the original Tidalis installer was pointing to.

Playing Well With Others

ABSTRACT
Chris Park discusses
the motivations behind the Indie Strategy Bundle, and his feelings on
indie collaboration in general.

Playing Well With Others

Q&A: PC Indie Game Sales Numbers

ABSTRACT
Chris Park discusses
the sales numbers for PC indie games based on his experience, as well
as other sources that he has read over the last few years.  Digital
sales numbers for AI War as of the time of the article are also
discussed.

Q&A: PC Indie Game Sales Numbers

A Quick Guide: How To Recognize An Arcen Title

ABSTRACT

Chris Park discusses
the "serious departure" that Tidalis represents from the pattern that
some fans were expecting of Arcen based on the sole data point of AI
War.  And, in general, discusses why this isn't a departure at all for
Arcen, and what the overall roadmap for the future of Arcen looks like,
genre-wise.  It's not puzzle games or strategy games, specifically, but
something much broader.



A Quick Guide: How To Recognize An Arcen Title

Tidalis Adventure Gameplay Video 1

As you can read all about on the post below, Tidalis is now in beta and available for preorder.  If you'd prefer a video introduction to the mechanics of the game before you download the demo, then this video covers the high points.  Enjoy!






View On Youtube

Tidalis Beta Begins, Now Available For Preorder!

What happens when a notable indie strategy developer makes a puzzle game?  We have no idea.  Our first game happened
to be a notable indie strategy game, but we’ve never considered ourselves tied to any particular genre. Truth is, we
made Tidalis because we like puzzle games and we wanted to take our opportunity to innovate in that space.




The "streams" mechanic employed by Tidalis is what makes it so unique -- chain reactions with a dozen blocks are
trivially easy to create.  This makes the game really easy to get into, but also makes the creation of advanced multi-stage
combos more challenging than in other block-based puzzlers.  At an advanced level of play, it’s the difference between
Chess and Checkers; with Tidalis in the hands of an expert, there are more variables to keep in mind as you set up truly
elegant interactions.




But never fear:  the easier difficulty levels are quite relaxed, and our Zen mode provides a particularly no-rush style
of gameplay.  The core mechanics are so simple that the two-year-old daughter of one of our staff enjoys playing along
with him.  And we suppose it goes without saying that many of our mothers are hooked on it, too.




Whether you’re just looking for a casual fun time,  a deep and strategic puzzle experience, or a series of brain-bending
puzzles, we’ve got you covered.  About half of the five staff members working on this game are the hardcore puzzle types,
and the other half have completely casual tastes.  We’ve approached this with our usual attention to detail: the
mechanics of the timing, chain merging, and other mechanics have been refined to a ridiculous degree to provide an
optimal experience in all play styles.




THE CURRENT VERSIONS ARE STILL BETA!  Sorry for the caps there, but it’s that important. This game is not nearly complete,
content-wise.  We have so many more levels, puzzles, game modes, and so forth to implement -- not to mention network play.  
But the core gameplay, and the first 30% or so of the content, has been polished to the point where we’re excited to finally
be able to share it with folks.  We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we’re enjoying making it!



What Do I Need To Know?

If you're potentially interested in the game, and potentially being part of the beta, you'll want to first take a look at our newly expanded Tidalis section of the website.  That first page has information on the beta, including what is currently available in the initial release, and what our upcoming roadmap is for hitting final release in a couple of months.




If you want to try before you buy (which we always strongly recommend), you'll particularly be interested in the Tidalis download page.  Both the Windows and Mac OSX versions of the game are now available.  If anyone is interested in trying to run one or the other of those on Linux, we'd be curious to hear how it works -- we're also still looking for feedback on what the minimum system requirements seem to be.  At present the game does great at 60 fps on the lowest-powered hardware we have around (around 1.6 Ghz), so we know it's somewhere south of that, but we don't know precisely where.




If you're looking to create and share puzzles, or to download puzzles from other players, we've set up a Tidalis Custom Puzzles forum.  Actually, there's a whole set of forums for the game here that you should check out if you're wanting to be active in the early Tidalis community.




Please visit the Tidalis tech support forum if you need any tech support.  Unlike AI War, Tidalis does not have any prerequisites, though it helps if your graphics card drivers are functional.




The Beta Begins!

If you were around for the Zenith Remnant beta, this process will be quite familiar.  We'll post updates several times a week (sometimes several times per day), and you can download them at your leisure.  The Tidalis engine includes a built-in patching system that is multiplatform and is even superior to the one currently being used by AI War (AI War's patching system will get an upgrade to this model soon).  For the latest beta update news and release notes, be sure to check or subscribe to the main Tidalis forum.  The first beta update will be out sometime tomorrow, and they will follow regularly from then on.




We at Arcen would like to extend our heartfelt thanks for all your ongoing support.  Even as this post was being typed out, a few preorders have already gone in for the game based on players who were actively waiting for it.  We couldn't do this without our wonderful community, and we're really excited not only to see AI War continue to grow, but to see Arcen grow as a company as we explore the first of what will hopefully be many genres in our portfolio.

From death declaration to dragons and damnation... and two 2D map editors

youtube-dl: hyzOB92EuZM | tinyogg

The 2D RTS Bos Wars (BW) 2.6 has been released, after two years of release-silence. The new release includes

• Enhancements to the editor and map format
• New units, tilesets, maps, translations (italian and portugese)
• A campaign

About the campagin, which is called "swindler", I can only say that the story drawings are beautiful and that the first mission is unbeatable boring (which is why I can't say anything about follow-up missions, if there are any): you need to navigate a weak unit through a maze of high-damage towers - blind. You only have a chance when you have a good memory and accept having to restart the mission 20 times. The only other scripted scenario is the tutorial level, which has (computer-generated) mission voices even! You can see both missions being played (and the mentioned story drawings) in this video [tinyogg].

The new map format is 'patch-based', which is like 'tile-based' I suppose, only that it allows you to use tiles of any dimensions. The editor works well, it could only use a 'tile draw mode' which would continue to draw tiles while holding down the mouse button (this happens for units, but not for tiles). Here's a video [tinyogg] demonstration of the editor, make sure to skip if it gets boring, I show off tile, resource and unit placement and then test-play the map.

What I really really want BW to have is a tower defense map/mode. :)

Since I started talking about editors, I'll just go ahead and show the PARPG one:

youtube-dl: vXqojPwGYj4 | tinyogg

The editor is all right, it seems to be a bit hard to get existing resources into the game though: they need to have a xml definition file for each image (hand-written I assume) and then you have to import them into the map with multiple mouse clicks.

You probably know of the lack of a maintainer for PARPG but there are also coding and asset-making jobs to do for Techdemo 2 - enter "2D" and "3D" into your browser's search function to filter out the art tasks. A list of 'good tasks for new programmers' was written, you also ask for guidance here. The current programmer's hot topic is "inventory and objects".

youtube-dl: NFoGyph_Bc4 | tinyogg

Formido is a short top-down shoot-until-aliens-kill-you game. It is well-made, but I won't be coming back to it as I will be doing to Violetland.

youtube-dl: bRnHlyYJSlI | tinyogg

Damnation of the Gods aims to become an enhanced Dungeon Master clone. Right now it is an old-school engine with a pleasant GUI which relies on freeware DMJ's assets. Assets is what the project mainly needs.. and maybe some guidance for a plot?..

youtube-dl: a6q4X3ZxKNM | tinyogg

Dragon History is a Czech-language (with some horrible but fun text translations) adventure game for scummVM. Its code is GPLv2-licensed. I got no reply yet after asking for the gfx and audio's license..

Did I already mention that my Linux game video recording troubles were over the day I discovered this guide to use ffmpeg for it?

Remember my high praise of krank? Well now thanks to above post you can finally witness [tinyogg] visuals and sound in motion!

Also, dear Linux users: get youtube-dl if you're unable to use the youtube website. It owns. Look for it in your software repository.

Oh wait, I forgot one piece of news:

youtube-dl: 3B4GVILtzIw | tinyogg

Search and Rescue 0.9 was released. Contrary to FlightGear I was able to get my vehicle into the air (on the third try ;) ). Sounds would not work but I kind of like the low-resolution textures. I'll have to play it a little more to figure out if there's more fun things to do besides crashing helicopters. ^^

SuperTux 3D & Xdriller

youtube-dl: NPK4ZaWYkJU | tinyogg: EWuLa

SuperTux 3D is a 2½ years old idea that is now being turned into reality by using the 2D platformer SuperTux' style and assets and the Blender Game Engine (BGE).
 I think the assets work well in 3D space, but of course controls and camera movement are unpleasant yet.

youtube-dl: OdV9cqdy49s | tinyogg: SRqm9

Xdriller is a falling-cubes-style puzzle game with nice colorful visuals and happy music. I found the game on SF.net a while ago and recently got reminded of it when I saw this tux model on OG.

Speaking of Blender and asset sharing: Blendswap currently has a poll on what website feature to add next (right sidebar here) and I would like to encourage you all to vote for the 'licensing' option, as once clear licenses exist, it will be possible to determine what models can be used in fully free as in you-know-what games.

Tidalis Teaser Trailer 1, Tidalis Beta Coming April 15th

Tidalis is the second standalone game from indie developer Arcen Games, known originally for their hardcore RTS/4X hybrid, AI War: Fleet Command.  Not wishing to be typecast, and having game and level design backgrounds in a wide variety of genres, Arcen chose pretty much the exact opposite genre for their second game.  The final game will be complete with Arcen staples such as co-op, huge amounts of content, and attention to depth and detail -- Tidalis is extremely easy for casual players to pick up, but it will also keep hardcore puzzle fans entertained for months.  




Also: it's coming to both Windows and Mac OSX!  Beta will begin on April 15th, 2010 for both platforms.  Beta means that people who want to demo the prerelease versions of the game can do so, and customers who preorder will be able to play the whole thing as soon as each new feature and component becomes available.  This should be a pretty familiar arrangement to anyone who was around for the beta phase of The Zenith Remnant -- though instead of soliciting feature suggestions, we'll be interested in fan-created levels and puzzles, some of which may make it into the official game (with permission, and with full credit given, of course).  Full digital release is expected in late June.






View On Youtube

AI War takes Best Overall Game in the 2010 Bytten Ernie Awards

Indie review site Bytten was among the first three sites to review AI War last year.  Today the 2010 iteration of their annual Ernie awards has come out, and (spoiler alert) AI War: Fleet Command received the Best Overall Game award from them.  We're couldn't be more pleased, as they were one of Arcen's earliest supporters, and from the general spread of scores they've historically given out, it actually means something for AI War to have done so well.

Hedgewars, JCRPG, and 0AD

Hmm, been a while, but since nobody is using my opensourcegames reddit yet, I'd better pitch in a bit here. Qubodup and Julius have been doing a stellar job in the last several months with some great posts.

Hedgewars 0.9.13 is out. It now looks better than the game it is a clone of (Worms 2) which is a pretty significant milestone. They have also started to add some features that were not in the original (also an important step - differentiation). I could reel off a list of new features since 0.9.12 but it's a futile task given there are so many. The standout features for me are the beautiful explosions, the birdy weapon, the generally impressive new graphics themes, and the trailer:

That is about as good a lesson in Internet marketing as you can get. Beautifully timed to the music, based on a very famous song, but in the style of the game characters. I found it to be very impressive and that's a trend since I originally tried out Hedgewars back when looking at all the available Worms/Artillery clones.

JCRPG

The ever-promising JCRPG has been ported from one Java 3D technology (jMonkeyEngine) to another (Ardor3D). The latter is a newer engine from the creators of the former, and seems to have taken several lessons on board with the design. The motivation for the port was difficult to debug crashes, but a number of nice enhancements have been discovered along the way and JCRPG really looks sumptuous.

Hopefully soon the game will start to get a bit of a storyline as well as beautiful scenery!

Finally, a pre-alpha download of 0ad is available. This utterly gorgeous looking historically-based RTS has so much potential. They have struggled to get more developers involved since originally going open source. I have been encouraging them to make a release and follow up with regular releases in order to expand the pool from which they may discover new contributors.

Here is a 2 year old trailer for 0ad.

Maybe they should make a new one, that could also be a marketing boost for the project.

ERROR 42: DEPRECATED DIMENSION; RESOLUTION NOT SUPPORTED

NOTE! YOU SHALL NOT FEED FROM THIS MESSAGE! REDIRECT BROWSER COURSE TO OUR INTERNET WEB PRESENCE NOW! CONTINUE

GREETINGS HUMANS WE COME IN PEACE AS LONG AS YOU OBEY! YOUR IRRELEVANT INHABITANCE OF THE SUPERFLUOUS THIRD DIMENSION WILL COME TO AN END! COLOR SPECTRUM REDUCTION WILL TAKE PLACE! CONTINUE

YOU HAVE THE CHOICE OF A MULTITUDE OH ANCIENT MODERN HISTORY. PROCEED! CONTINUE




WE HAVE COME TO LEARN ALSO! YOU MUST LEAD US TO 2D VECTOR AWESOMENESS IN THE COMMENT SECTION! vvv END

ps: you probably missed it.