SMC & internal affairs

SMC 1.5: New particle effects and enemies

You can now download version 1.5 of Secret Maryo Chronicles (smc). Lots of improvements found their way in:

New World, many new sprites, replaced enemies, particle emitter, ambient sound, many fixes and more!

The project is moving the game's visual style further away from it's Mario inspiration - I applaud to that. There still is a bunch of tasks for audio and 2D graphics artists though.

A bit of a while ago, the platform game scored first place on yet another genuine top open source games list™.

Okay. The update on smc was actually just a cover up. You and I, dear reader, we have to talk. Text browser folks and RSS users can leave now.

This is what Free Gamer will look like... maybe

This blog will get a new look soon. If you care about the style of the text you read here, please take a look at the current work in progress and comment on it. Let me help you help me help you (help me?)

Screenshots are for wimps

Glest 3.1.2 has been released (changelog, linux). Fixes, minor improvements, good to see some sustained activity for the project and hopefully it keeps on going like this.

SuperTuxKart 0.4 is being packaged as we speak. Eventually (although not yet as of time of writing) they'll be up on Sourceforge. It goes from being quite a naff game (STK 0.3 was basically TuxKart with better graphics, and TuxKart has some serious gameplay flaws) to being really quite a good game. Now it is a bit of polish and some better tracks away from being a great game. I suggest you try it out, the improvement is massive, and if 0.5 brings the same level of improvements as this release, then STK 0.5 will be a very good game indeed.

There's a bit of competition around the corner though. Platinum Arts Sandbox 2.1 was released. This is a sandbox game aimed at kids and this version contains a kart racing mode so kids can build their tracks in the very easy Sauer environment (PAS is a Sauer derivative) and then race on them all without the game without specialist tools or knowledge.

Speaking of Sauerbraten, here's some videos showing how basic world editing works.

Word War vi (that's vi as in vi vs emacs as opposed to VI as in 4 6 (d'oh! dang roman numerals...)) is a side scrolling shooter which is, well, kinda geeky but also kinda fun. (Did you spend a few secs thinking "World War IV" too?)

Finally, the Secret Maryo Chronicles project is looking for a new name to get away from copyright trademark issues with the Mario franchise. I'm sure all good ideas are welcome.

In case you didn't guess from the title, there's no screenshots in the post. I'm too busy to do it today! Edit: Ok, thought I'd post this Word War iv vi video since it's kinda cool:

Dreaming of a Sensi Xmas

Yoda Soccer

Yoda Soccer 0.73 came out at the start of November - looks like that one slipped past most of the open source community. However it looks like 0.73 will be the last release for this Sensible Soccer clone. Whilst they have gone most of the way to recreating the classic game, the limitations of the platform used to create it (the proprietary BlitzMax) means the authors have created a new project, Open World Soccer, which will be a Sensi clone in C++. There is already an alpha release (very alpha) which shows off higher res graphics although not much more. For those people pining for a bit of Sensi nostalgia, try out Yoda Soccer which is relatively complete.

The Castle 0.8 is available for download. It's still a bit of a tech demo, but the initial level looks promising. It's nice to see somebody making progress with a single player FPS game, although there is still a long way to go with this one.

Dream Chess

Dream Chess 0.2 is pretty amazing as far as chess games go. I can't wait for them to add FICS [Free Internet Chess Server] support although that could spell doom for this blog as I'm short on time as it is! ;-)

I tried out Secret Maryo Chronicles the other day, checking it out as a potential game for my son. I couldn't believe how good it has become. Just 6 months ago gameplay was dodgy, sprites and sounds were ripped. It was a mess. Now, it makes Super Tux look like ordinary Tux. It takes a classic and gives it high res graphics and a cute facelift and everything just seems to be better done than Super Tux. At least SMC doesn't pretend to not be a Mario clone and just indulges in it's heritage. I hope the Super Tux developers see it and use it as a cue to make Super Tux not so Super Mario.

Extreme Tux Racer

Extreme Tux Racer

The team over at Extreme Tux Racer - the latest fork to take on the Tux Racer continuation mantle - have made their inaugral release. It's still a bedding-in period with no real major updates other than a new campaign (cup?) but hopefully it will signal the start of a new lease of life for development of a popular open source franchise.

FreeLords, the project cloning Warlords, have made their first release since changing to Java as their programming language of choice. No more dependencies (except Java, of course), automatic portability, and the promise of network play, all bode well for the future but this snapshot release isn't playable yet. However it seems their time machine works well since these announcements are from 2008 - if they have a time machine then this game is sure to succeed.

LordsAWar, a fork of discontinued FreeLords C++ codebase, has hit version 0.0.3. Whilst that sounds very small I think it's not really a reflection on the completeness (implying 3%) as the C++ FreeLords was in development for years and I think this project is just trying to gain some early momentum.

The Secret Maryo project is keeping up it's good progress with another release. Version 1.1 sees the game make more steps to being a platform game worthy of the Mario moniker that it emulates.

The OpenTyrian project came up on the freegamedev.net forums. Tyrian is an old DOS game, a vertical scrolling shooter. Those games used to be so much fun - most games did in those days. Anyway, before I digress, this is just a port of the game to C/SDL. You need the original game to play it :-( but, since it's available on most abandonware sites, that shouldn't be hard to find.

Also I note Free Gamer made its debut on Slashdot, more about that tomorrow. No, it's not so significant that it gets its own post, it just caused me to think about something I wanted to express i.e. when the first iteration of this paragraph was longer than the rest of the post put together, it became obvious it needed its own space. ;-)

Sitting on my Toadstool

I came across an interesting Ubuntu forum thread the other day - where I posted this on May 26th 2006:

This thread has inspired me to do something:
http://freegamer.blogspot.com/

Fascinating. It's come a long way since then! :-)

The big news of today is probably the Secret Maryo Chronicles 1.0 release. It's an intriguing project and is gaining some very nice vector-based graphics. I'm still not convinced they have replaced all the ripped graphics and sounds that were in the previous version (0.99.7) nor addressed the gameplay defficiencies I felt were present - the feel of the game wasn't quite right - there is no acceleration, you are either running or not running, making it hard to control the character. It is still an ongoing project and importantly it's a playable game with a fair amount of levels and decent graphics so is worth checking out. It's definitely close to being an open source game that makes people go, "Oooh, nice!" ;-)

Finity Flight II is an open source overhead 2D shooter which several episodes to play and is available for both Linux and Windows. I gave it a shot - it had nice graphics but the gameplay was mystifying to me. I struggled to shoot or be shot unless I was stationary. All artwork and code is available under GPL. It's intriguing and the author has obviously put a lot of effort into it, and has a few other games available.

AlphaShooter is a sci-fi first person shooter. Whilst it may never become a fully fledged game in it's own right, the author has put it online and continues to work on it it the hope that it will be useful as an example on how to get started in computer graphics and games development.

Back to the shadows to plot the expansion of my Free Gamer empire... ;-)