FAR Colony Funding & Kambi Engine Donations (Is it possible to make money with open source games?)

The "Is it possible to make money" thread was revived recently. And then two projects I follow announced new funding-'features':

FAR Colony (First Autonomous Remote Colony) is "a game of exploration and space colonization being held in the 23th century". An 8 bit funding page was created [announcement] for it recently. The target is $800 in 109 days. A note at the bottom says:

Of course this project will continue to progress even if my goals aren't reached, it will be more slowly and limited without but will stay alive !

This makes me wonder: how to motivate donations towards open source games (besides making a good game ;) ).

Kambi (VRML) Engine has introduced a fundry.com page for project pledges, feature pledges and donations [announcement]. Fundry.com looks interesting and like an easy way to play the 'donation game', a concept I talked about long ago. Fundry currently accepts paypal only.

The only other open source game project to use fundry.com is the Construct SDK. Fundry has no API yet and writes "Contact us to let us know how you would use it." I think perhaps a Trac integration should be neat..

On a related note: sound specialists can earn $200 on this swamp sound task for Wesnoth.

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Purity

A long time ago, on the old FreeGameDev forum, I heard of Purity; an original game based on the idTech3 engine.

Recently, I was wondering what the project had become, and with the help of a few people on the irc channel, we managed to find the website, unfortunately, it appears the development stopped two years ago.

But the game is pretty cool, let me explain you what makes it interesting:

In Purity, there are no enemies! The enemy is the map, and you have to get you to the end.

In order to do that, you have 4 weapons:

-The PULS attack : a red rocket.

It allows you to activate red switches, and it allows you to jump. Right, in purity, you have no "jump button". You wanna jump? Shoot your feet, and you'll be sent in the air.

There is no lives or damage in purity, so it is not a big deal to shoot right between your feet.

You can also shoot the walls while you're in the air to project yourself higher. People who know DeFrag won't be surprised by this technique.

-The TRASE attack : a blue laser (Allows you to activate blue switches).

This laser works a bit like a hook : you can drag yourself to blue surfaces.

You can also repulse yourself from some other special blue surfaces.

-The BOM attack : a green grenade (Allows you to activate green switches).

This grenade implodes rather than explodes : if you are in the range of the grenade when it explodes, you'll be dragged to the center, and when the explosion finishes, you'll keep that speed, so you can use the BOM attack to project you to a other place.

There are also special surfaces where the grenade sticks.

-The SPHEER attack : a white shield (Allows you to activate white switches).

The SPHEER attack allows you to bounce like a bouncing ball.

Activating the SPHEER attack while you are running makes you dash, which permits you to jump over some short holes.

Combinations :

combination of bom+trase

And what makes Purity really great is that you can combine these attacks:

-Shooting a BOM attack with a TRASE attack makes it explode

-Activating the SPHEER in the range of a BOM attack makes it explode

-Using the TRASE attack on a PULS attack drags you to the rocket, basically letting you fly (I think this combo should be less powerful, maybe even removed, to make the puzzle game interesting)

-Activating the SPHEER while catching up a PULS attack makes it explode and projects you in the air

What still needs to be done in Purity:

-Audio needs to be redone, sounds are horrible and there is no music (though there is one really good in the video on their website)

-Some graphic effort could be made : some surfaces aren't really pretty.

-MAPS! Purity only has the 8 maps that train you to use the weapons and their combinations. Other maps available are training grounds with no end, just for practise.

Try and beat this!

So, I beg mappers here, please do some puzzle maps for Purity, it's all it lacks to be a great FOSS game!

PS : If you are an archlinux user, I made an aur package that allow you to install it easily in /opt : http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=46512

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Developer Interview: Jared "Deraj" (Radius Engine/Avoision/Falling Blocks Game 2)

Avoision & FBG2

Avoision and Falling Blocks Game 2 were reviewed 5 weeks ago in the Simple & Polished post and I got curious about the perspective of a small-foss-games developer (the interviews we have had so far were rather with big project developers). Their developer Jared "Deraj" agreed to a short interview.


Hey Jared! Where are you from? How's the weather? What do you do in life?

I'm from Washington (USA). Right now, it's cloudy outside, but somewhat warm (considering it's winter here).

I work in software development for a large technology company.

Did you create Radius Engine as a first step towards a game you want to make or was it more of a programming exercise? What is the next step? Adding engine features?

The Radius Engine as it exists today is indeed a stepping stone towards my eventual goal of creating an extensible scrolling shooter ("shoot 'em up"). Avoision and Falling Block Game were both games I wanted to create, but they were also both attempts at ensuring that the Radius Engine has the features I'll need down the road.

Additionally, the entire process was a great learning experience for me (e.g. I had never really written audio mixing or collision detection code before).

Did you ever contribute to any foss game projects?

Other than the ones FOSS games I've created, I think my only (very minor) contributions have been to a (formerly?) defunct emulator many years ago. Does moral support count? :)

Sure does! Ever heard of LÖVE? It's a 2D Lua-based game engine. Did the knowledge of LÖVE affect Radius engine development in any way?

Unfortunately, I had not heard of LÖVE back when I started working on this project (originally in 2003, but then I started over in 2008), but it looks like a great engine with a permissive license, simple programming language (Lua), and comprehensive feature set.

Having recently completed two games using a simple OpenGL+SDL+Lua game engine (Avoision and Falling Block Game), I can safely say that LÖVE sounds like a great idea for a game engine (and one that I need to look at more closely).

What are the chances of you abandoning Radius and becoming a LOVE2D developer? (Completely hypothetical :) )

Heh, interesting question. Given that I haven't had the time to fully dig into LOVE2D, that's a tough call to make. I'll certainly look into that since it looks like LOVE2D is fairly mature already.

How come Avoision and FBG2 have such smooth controls? Lucky shot or days of tweaking?

Both :)

Do you have a laid out plan for making progress towards your shmup project?

I have goals in mind (namely extensibility/modding), but only a very rough plan. Since I'm mostly doing this for fun, I tend to work on whatever seems fun/interesting at the time.

Soo... how about a sneak peak?

Screenshots are really all I have at the moment. I try to participate in Screenshot Saturday each week. You can watch my progress on Twitter (#RadiusEngine).

Jared's super secret shmup WIP screens

Got any questions to Jared aka Deraj? Ask them in the comments, perhaps he'll answer! :)


Also, this link will let you browse all the interviews on Free Gamer so far.

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OpenMW 0.9 and DungeonHack Progress

OpenMW 0.9 is now available for download. Features:

• Exterior cells - loading, unloading and management
• Character Creation GUI
• Character creation
• Make cell names case insensitive when doing internal lookups
• Music player
• NPCs rendering

No screenshots I'm afraid!

DH concept art from the "clothing the Estonian" thread

DungeonHack will have a new software architecture [git repo], estimated to be showcased very soon. [announcement]

I noticed that both projects have a "Contributions Wanted" link which leads to their milestone/roadmap tickets (on a wiki page) [dh/owm]. I get the feeling it's time to start using trac, as does PARPG for example. :)

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ProFlightSimulator: Commercial FlightGear Fork (Weak)

ProFlightSimulator ad on Free Gamer

A reader pointed out a hilarious coincidence: an ad of ProFlightSimulator, a fork of FlightGear on top of the Ripping-off open engine games post.

ProFlightSimulator is an open source stand alone Flight Simulator. As always disclosed this is a split / branch from the FlightGear community and has been set up for a very specific reason. It's different from FG due to the many major changes to the game.

This info is placed in Disclaimer/Terms/IsThisFlightgear?.

The text "Source code available in members area" is part of a background image in the footer of their homepage. There is also a .7z file containing "Source code of these images, content and files" (244MB - For a list of the file's content see here).

Why PFS is not FlightGear

The FlightGear team is aware of the for-pay forks and wrote a FlightGear-Professional explanation of the situation.

I have an ethical problem with there not being a "for every (final) purchase, we donate $1 to the FlightGear project" commitment. Maybe the improvements/code changes are at least useful to the FlightGear project, if any of the devs went through the trouble of buying PFS.

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Ripping off Open-Source-Engine Games: Lugaru

Lugaru is a proprietary game. The Lugaru source code was released under GPL. The Lugaru game data was released under a "freely redistributed for non commercial purposes" license. Here's an explanation by Wolfire but it's basically just like Quake, only that the Quake game data was never released for free and never with the engine code and that they used a zip file, not a repository.

Recently, scammers sold the game Lugaru on Apple's App Store. They had this to say:

"we have every legal right to market and sell the software"

"the license we were granted allows for non-exclusive redistribution of the source code or the compiled product, modified or unmodified, for a fee or free of charge."

Wolfire wrote a blog post when they found out about this and another one when the cloned product was finally taken down.

The implication, according to Wolfire:

"While released source code in no way makes it legal to sell someone else's game, it is apparently enough to make scammers think they could get away with it, and that may be enough to discourage other developers from risking it."

STK on ebay

SuperTuxKart is the project I first knew about is being sold by third parties although I can't find any discussions on that topi any more (see comments for info from their side). SuperTux' archives contain a bit of reading material about what problems they had.

ILLUSION MAGE!!! THIS IS NOT BLENDER!!

Blender is also having problems with scammers. (Thanks to Peragro Tempus for the info)

Quite a few foss software on ebay too. This seller seems to be specialized in selling foss games and apps while trying to hide their name. Assuming all they do is sell open source software for $6.65, then they earned $14,277.55 in at least 2147 sales since November 2009 (about $950/month). That'd be kind of lame.

Side note: I just found a Lugaru fork, which claims the animation data is CC-BY-SA'd, which according to file size (didn't do a diff check) is the original data. The original Lugaru repository's license file states no such thing.

I wonder though, would have Lugaru's incident have happened, if they did not put code and data in the same repository? What do you think? And do you know of more incidents of this kind?

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LanPower's FOSS Games USB Stick

The following is a guest post by the president of the French language gaming community LanPower [fr-en translation] which distributes game compilations.

Gamekey 2 games

The LanPower association is a French group of network game players. We contribute to Free Open Source ("libre") games by producing CD/USB compilations of games: "LanPower Games CDs" and "Gamekey".

The Gamekeys are composed of portables games. These compilations are for Windows but all the games also exist under Linux.

The last series are compatible with Linux thanks to Wine. Thus the Gamekey light serie 2 is the first compilation of portable and free open source games to be compatible with both Windows and Linux (as well as MacOS X and Solaris).

Links:

• Our web site
• Description of the Gamekey Light Series 2 (english)

We intend to translate the Gamekey and the other compilations in several languages if we find the time or get translation help or donations.
An international (5 languages) version is in progress, and should be out in May.

Enjoy

contact : asso [dot] lanpower [at] free [dot] fr

What do you think of such downloadable game packages? Ever used one? Ever wished for one so you don't have to research/download games individually?

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