LÖVE game programming course for kids/teens in Kansas City (August 2012)

There will be a Lua game programming class for kids and teens in Kansas City by indie game developer Rachel Morris some time in August 2012.

LÖVE 2D game engine and Tiled Map Editor will be used. Both are open source and run perfectly fine on Linux systems.

Rachel is known for OpenArt and you can check out an interview with her or her GitHub repositories.

video: Beginning Programming guide - Need newbies

Feedback on the existing course materials and of course participants are requested.

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AlienArena reloaded edition

The PR machine behind AlienArena seems to have found out by rigorous focus-group testing and public surveying, that a re-branding of the idtech2 based arena FPS, was in order...
But here on the uncompromising last resort of free and unbiased game journalism we call it what it is: a nice new release, bumping the version number to 7.60; because as you should know... a higher number is always better :p

New alien spider bots!

Obviously it wasn't just the number that changed, and the list of engine, art and gameplay improvements is actually quite impressive for this release.
Another thing they updated is their website (the old one was quite horrible), and while this is a open-source game only by its engine code and sadly not media, I really like their new slogan:

Open Sourced. Ever Evolving.

Which has a certain ring to it ;)

Speaking of PR efforts, there is now a dedicated PR team for War§ow and the long awaited 0.7 release is slowly moving forward and you can see (incl. many nice screenshots) what kind of changes you can expect here.

Screenshot from the War§ow 0.7 changelog thread

There is also an BETA release of the version 0.7 (which according to standard version naming schemes should be a beta itself I guess ;) ) which can be downloaded here.

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Open Source Game Summer Screen Shorts 2012 #2

Haunts: The Manse Macabre is a BSD-code/CC-BY-NC-SA-art Kickstarter-funded, turn-based RPG(?). There are still a few hours left to contribute to additional features.

Sintel: The Game, currently completely CCBY3-licensed, just had their first alpha release! They have original voice acting and all! (Although I did not manage to get it running on Linux yet).

Irrlicht-based cute Puzzle Moppet has been released under the WTFPL and I was able to replace all non-free textures and sounds. Now all we need is a repository coordinator.

Valyria Tear is a continuation of the jRPG Hero of Allacrost project with an active development blog.

Frogatto is a well-designed-code, beautiful-proprietary-pixel-art platformer. The developers started "making friends" on their blog by talking about projects they like.

idTech3 was reviewed in an extensive, illustrated article.

Summoning Wars, a 3d-visuals hack'n'slash needs a new lead developer.

A discussion about OpenGameArt's usability for game developers started on their forums. Improvements were recently added to the texture section and this is a chance to formulate enhancement to the other sections.

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BananaBread, Sauerbraten in HTML5

Bananabread is the spiritual successor to Syntensity (which added a Javascript scripting layer to Sauerbraten) only this time running inside the player's browser. It was ported using Emscripten, a C++ (LLVM) to Javascript compiler, and seems to have quite a lot of Sauerbraten's functionality ported over, including bots, multiple weapons, map editing, and even a Javascript api to control camera cutscenes.

It currently runs in the development versions of Firefox and Chrome and seems to get about 1/3rd to 1/4th of native fps. Get the source here: https://github.com/kripken/BananaBread

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Open Source Game Summer Screen Shorts 2012 #1

Knights, a top-down multiplayer quest/fighting game, received some GUI enhancements.

Tales of Gydia, a Liberated Pixel Cup fantasy turn-based RPG that focuses on UGC, was started on SourceForge.net.

Unknown Horizons, a historical city-building and economy RTS, received some new citizen building graphics from a first-time contributor.

Black Dog, an extremely atmospheric HTML5, fully-FOSS helicopter mini-game, got its (unfinished) Android port released.

Linus Torvalds not only showed his annoyance with Nvidia but also his love towards open source games in a recent talk (goto 58m20s).

ctdabomb, an active community member, converted and license-clarified the Art Museum SuperTuxKart racing track over the time span of about one and a half months, after asking the community for support.

SuperTux, a cute platformer, needs help finishing an animated owl sprite. To the left, you can see the current placeholder graphics.

FLARE, a hack'n'slash RPG engine and game, requested translations via email, pull request or forum post.

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Liberated Pixel Cup July 2012: Coding Phase

The Content Creation Phase of the Liberated Pixel Cup is over!


You might want to ignore this blog post and read their announcement instead.


Here is a partial preview of the results:

More, not so nice previews: [part1, part2]

18 minute preview of all .flac files (two .ogg files excluded):
Download from box.net [mp3, 17M or ogg, 13M]


Get all files from opengameart.org/lpc-art-entries in .zip format:
Download from mediafire.com [link, 185M], box.net [part1, 96M | part2, 90M]

Now it is time for the Coding Phase of the Liberated Pixel Cup!

Rules:

• Start: July 1st, 12:01 AM Pacific Daylight Time
• End: July 31st, 11:59PM Pacific Daylight Time
• License:  Code entries must be free and open source, and must be available under the GNU GPL 3.0.  You may optionally release the code under any additional license(s) that you choose.
• Source code:  You must provide the complete source code for your entry.  Any code you have written for your game prior to the beginning of the contest must be made available at the beginning of the contest.
• Platform:  Your code must be able to be compiled and run on a 100% free-as-in-freedom platform.  It may not make use of any proprietary libraries or VMs.  Just to be clear, we cannot accept games that will ONLY run on one of the following:  Flash, Silverlight, XNA, Unity, Windows, MacOS , Mac OS X, iOS, proprietary JVMs, or similar.  It is perfectly acceptable if your game runs on any of these platforms, but it must also work on an open platform (we strongly recommend making sure that your program run on modern flavors of GNU/Linux, as all of the judges will have access to it).
• Framework:  You may use an existing engine or framework, or build your game from scratch.

Judging Criteria:

• Consistency of style:  Your game should primarily make use of the art either provided for or entered into the contest.  You may add additional art if needed, but all original art included in the game must be available under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GNU GPL 3.0 (existing art from other sources may be under any free-as-in-freedom license).
• Ease of use:  Your game should be easy to compile and run.  You won't be disqualified automatically if a judge is unable to run your game, but it will count against you.  You are advised to avoid having large numbers of obscure dependencies or requiring bleeding edge (unstable) libraries.
• Creativity:  Games will be judged on how creatively they use the artwork.
• Judge's opinion:  How much the judges like your game.

Good luck and great Success!

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OverDose now officially... hmm?... open-source?

Somehow I was under the impression that the team behind Overdose had realized some time ago that by using the idTech2 base they would be bound to the GPL licensing requirements, and abandoned plans to buy a separate license just to keep the code closed... however that was never officially announced until now:

This now means that OverDose is totally open, totally moddable, and totally complete with its own mod tools, which include level compilers, map editors, font tools, custom HD .RoQ video compilers, texture compression tools, model format tools… Lets just say, a decent package of tools with a fully written SDK and developer wiki. So you don’t just get the game source code, you get the full shebang, everything. Of course media still belongs to OverDose, but the above should be great news to any mod people or budding game makers.
Whats more, the code is available… Right now! Get in touch at odium@team-blur-games.com for a link to the codebase which is constantly updated! Any budding coders out there who want to be part of the OverDose team be sure to get in touch, we always, ALWAYS need more coders ;)

In their recent news they also mention that they have realized that keeping the source closed doesn't help against hackers (a realization that comes better late then never :) ) and that their updated (GTK-Radiant based) level-editor is now available. That they add all their other (AFAIK Windows only) tools into the open-source mix too is an unexpected but very nice bonus!

Some recent automatic foliage tests

I assume by asking for code access they will point you to the "hidden" repository here, but giving them some positive feedback by asking for it, will probably be the "right thing"tm to do ;)

Oh and don't miss the long WIP thread with some nice (but over post-processed) screens here.

WIP weapon model

Last but not least: To avoid sounding too negative *again*, I think this is a great development and this could become a really nice open-source modding platform, specially if they make at least a base set of assets available under a more liberal license *hint* ;) So show them some support by helping out or maybe donating.

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