Some Puzzle Games

FreeTumble is yet another "destroy adjacent same-color bricks" puzzle game but one of the better-looking and -sounding ones. Three modes of gameplay are provided, they can be seen as variation of the same game for different types of puzzle players or different hardness modes.

FreeTumble - I much like that there is a credits screen

Biniax-2 is an original puzzle game in which colors also play a role and which also is stronger on the visual side than your typical open source Tetris clone. It features a turn-based and continuous mode. The latter can be played with two players in a versus-game.

Biniax-2 (no sound)

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection will help you if you're bored at the office or similar.

CreepSmash is a java-based multiplayer tower defense game. Have some videos of it too!

26 June 06:09 UTC PS: RubyWeekend #3 with the theme "A Tiny World" started a few hours ago. It's a 3-day open source ruby game programming competition.

Read More

Turn up the juice!

Go Ollie

An open source platformer I missed yesterday is Go Ollie. It's easy to overlook, I mean, worms are not exactly a glamorous topic. Whilst I'm not sure about the license (somebody care to check? I'm busy!) the game itself is polished and fun. The controls are different to your typical platformer, where instead of moving and jumping your character directly, you select where he moves to with the mouse. Places that can be reached are highlighted, so it's about picking the right path and having the reflexes to do it quickly enough, which can be tricky on scrolling levels.

It seems to be a gift to the Linux community from game makers Tweeler. The graphics and presentation look professional. It's a great game for kids as well as a fun time waster for adults.

<update> Actually Go Ollie is by Charlie Dog Games, but Tweeler acts as a download host for the Mac/Linux version. Also, it is definitely open source - code is GPLv3 and artwork CC-by-sa with exceptions for logos. </update>

VDrift

There's a new release of VDrift, the open source drift racing game. Version 2009-06-15 is a significant release for the project which sees it re-emerge from a massive refactor as a better game than before the refactoring began. Here's a list of the major changes since the last release, which was after the refactored code stabilized:

• cars collide with each other in Single Race mode now


• AI is capable of much faster driving now, so added a difficulty slider


• off-road tire spin sound support (thanks to slowdan!)


• support for H-gate shifters


• improved performance


• lots of huge bugs fixed, especially car physics bugs

TORCS

In other racing game news, the TORCS Endurance World Championship 2009 was recently held. The full report found on a participants blog. From what I can gather, it's a long distance race (500km) where people enter their own robot drivers to see how they fare.

Base Command is a fully finished OGRE mini-game. It's a straightforward 3D protect-your-base game, where you shoot down incoming planes. What is interesting is the author has provided an analysis of the game code which would help people who are learning how to program.

Scourge map

My favourite Free software game Scourge enjoys continued progress. There's now an artistic map of the large island that is the game world. There's more information to be found in the 28th "Scourge Weekly" that tracks major developers on an almost-weekly basis. They are still looking for contributors.

There's also more juicy updates on PARPG progress. That project is looking very promising and they are working their way towards their first demo release. Given the coordination and generally high activity of that project, I'm optimistic there'll be something solidly playable before the end of the year. Our own Q put together a video showing where they are currently up to:

Other interesting updates are:

• Lips of Suna's second release, version 0.0.2, which introduces destructible voxel terrain. Lips of Suna aims to be an innovative 3D online dungeon crawl.


• The first beta of Leges Motus, a kind of gravityless 2D multiplayer shoot-em-up.


• A new Palomino release, a lovely looking 3D flight simulator - see this Free Gamer article for more flight sims.

There's probably more... feel free to add updates in the comments below!

Read More

Platformer roundup

I thought I'd check out how Super Tux development is going. I grabbed the lastest svn, compiled, and performance was so abominable that it took me a minute just to quit. It didn't help that it was placed half-off the screen (probably because I have a dual screen setup) Super Tux used to run fine. I'll hold my hands up and say I'm using an nvidia chipset and the open source driver without any significant OpenGL Acceleration, but it's a 2D game. I hope they work on some kind of OpenGL-less fallback.

Mole Invasion

One little-known but very promising platformer is Mole Invasion. The website is mainly in French, but there is a dedicated English page. The game language defaults to English. The current release is version 0.4, and the first thing you notice is the Mario-like logo; obviously the inspiration for the gameplay. The second thing you notice is the performance - it runs great. It's really smooth, the animations are good, the characters move well, and there's plenty of variation. A lot of the levels are obviously made with testing in mind, and some of the graphics are still a bit raw, but otherwise it was a fun experience.

Mole Invasion feels like it is headed in the direction that Super Tux should have been. I can't help but feel that Super Tux development has significantly lost it's way. The first few post-GotM releases of Super Tux were very promising, and very well received. That was now several years ago, and little has changed for the better, some questionable decisions (move to OpenGL), and new milestones seem on the other end of a development void.

The Legend of Edgar

There's a new Parallel Realities game out. The Legend of Edgar is a platform game with a fantasy setting. I had a go with 0.1, which is playable with a single player storyline. For me, it suffers from the same issues I have with Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid - the movement is just way too slow. It takes many minutes to navigate levels to the point that exploring a level is just tedious as you wait for your character to amble his way around.

Remember Frogatto is a old-style platformer starring an anthropomorphic frog, championed by the lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth? It celebrates pixels and thrives on cute blocky graphics. There are updated Frogatto builds for Windows and Mac from the weekend, although pious Linux users must compile from source. I couldn't compile it. I had previously, and it was looking promising! Anybody else managed to compile it on Fedora?

Widelands

The next version of Widelands - based on the classic RTS gameplay of Settlers II - is fast approaching. "Build 14" will come with GGZ support, making it much easier to find multiplayer opponents. Map auto-generation, lots of other small enhancements, more campaigns and a better beta testing phase should make this the Widelands release well worth playing.

Read More

What planet are you on?

Wesnoth Knight

Battle for Wesnoth continues to get stupendously good art contributions such as this series of Loyalist portraits.

Hot on the heels of Extreme Tux Racer 0.5beta, contributor and original Tux Racer developer Erin has introduced his rewrite to the world. Tentatively named Bunny Hill, the rewrite has a better design resulting in better performance, nicer graphics (in some ways, lesser in others) and more features. It looks like it will probably become ETR 0.6 once the dust has settled.

PARPG Weapons

PARPG is back from the dead. 3 weeks not blogging being 'dead' apparently. The project itself is thriving, with plenty of graphical creativeness whilst the coders assess their options for developing the game.

Unknown Horizons will have a new release very soon!

Widelands is getting randomly generated maps.

Simutrans Subways

It looks like Simutrans is getting subways, at least pak96.comic is anyway. Subterranean!

There'll be loads more updates to your favourite Free games but I don't have my finger on the pulse as much as I used to, so...

...so...

...post them in the comments!

Update: the FreeOrion project released version 0.3.13 and it has a huge changelog.

Read More

Fellow adventurer, turn back while you can!

Crikey, it's been a while. What can I say, life gets busy, and games sometimes just can't be a priority. I know, it's crazy talk. I meditated long and hard, facing many demons, moments of utter despair, but I couldn't get past the conclusion that sometimes Free Gamer won't be on my list of things to do. Fortunately Q has been on top of things so it's not silent when I'm off the radar.

Today is a temporary reprieve, brought on somewhat by enjoying the current development pace of the Scourge project. Timong, of JCRPG fame, has been taking a break from Java coding to indulge in his new found passion for music composition. You can listen to the new main theme music he has composed for Scourge, one of many he has contributed lately. I think it sounds pretty damn good. Meanwhile you can now roam around a massive persistent outdoor world in Scourge, with generated villages and NPCs as well as varying climate and weather conditions. It all sounds quite impressive.

IVAN

On another dungeoneering frontier, Iter Vehemens ad Necem (aka IVAN) is probably the most challenging and addictive nethack variant I ever played. (Although I only ever played a couple.) It has surprisingly good 2d graphics, which aren't done justice by the screenshot, but alas development stalled after 2005. The IVAN community seems to be filling the void left by the developers who[se motivation] seem[s] to have met some kind of gruesome demise - perhaps their brains turned into banana flesh by a vindictive god.

There is the IVANX project which seems to pull together a lot of the popular community contributions, and should be more likely to compile on Linux. There's also LIVAN which stands for Linux IVAN, thus should compile on Linux. Neither compiled for my Fedora laptop, somewhat thankfully as it means I can't play it and thusly be more productive! \o/

IVAN 3D

Of extra interest is IVAN 3D which turns it into a bit of a funky pixelated adventure. There's obviously quite a few challenges to overcome when transposing a totally 2D described game into a 3D world without it looking a bit other-worldly. Still, I don't think pixels are a bad thing. After all, it's a game, not a life simulation!

OWS

Hey look, Open World Soccer is moving steadily towards being a modern Sensible Soccer clone. Impressive looking! However the AI doesn't do too much yet, just keeping the two teams level with the ball.

Raidem is one of those vertical scrolling shooters, a nice classic pixel explosion fest. It is surprisingly well done, but it's also bloody hard - I never survived more than 20-30s. From the intro screen, it looks like the author needs an additional graphic designer but other than that it's a very nice looking game. No development since 2006 though so I guess it's to be taken as-is.

Another game that is surprisingly well done is Abe's Amazing Adventure. It looks weird, really weird. However the animations are very smooth and the game plays pretty well, far better than it looks. Still, I couldn't quite get over the game's oddness.

Read More

idTech engine game news

Tremfusion is a fork of Tremulous, that wants to be more open in development. There's more to read on its organization and philosophy (too many words for my taste). One of the most noticeable changes is the use of the Xreal as the game engine. Thanks to Julius for letting us know.

An audio interview with Quake2World's lead coder reveales details about improvements in his graphics and physics engine. (I don't like podcasts usually but this one is pretty interesting.)

An audio interview of Lee Vermeulen, founder of the Nexuiz project, was published on the new site Open Gaming Now. The audio unfortunately is of a not-so-good telephone line quality and the added music makes it even a little bit harder to listen. Lee tells about the early history of the project, but other than that it's mainly a introduction to Nexuiz.

The rest & snippets

Voxelstein

Andrewj, one of the best Let's Play artists, has recently recorded a playthrough of Voxelstein, the Wolfenstein3D-inspired shooter with voxels (you can destroy everything) which unfortunately is win-only. Here's the video.

Palomino flight simulator release 20090511 adds shaders to the game.

Boomwar Nitro 0.1b1 has been released [win32 binary] (after 2.5 years of no releases, but some svn activity). It appears to be using the non-free Newton Game Dynamics lib, so I refrained from compiling it.

Last time I mentioned PopCap Framework. Now I found out about PyCap, a python wrapper for the PopCap framework. Thanks to GBGames for passively helping me find this. :)

Slick is a LWJGL-based Java game lib, which even supports SVG (not completely though). Some of these games make use of slick and two of them are supposedly free software. (I haven't searched for the source much though).

There's a first screenshot of Nethack_3D.

Hey, what do Glest, Freeciv, FreeCol, FreedroidRPG, FlightGear, Nexuiz, OpenArena, Sauerbraten, SuperTux, SuperTuxKart, Warsow and Yo Frankie have in common? - All of them are being STOLEN by reckless PIRATES. ARR!

Read More

Sauerbraten Trooper Edition, first playable Mark IV network Demo

Sauerbraten [more screens]

Cube 2: Sauerbraten Trooper Edition has been released [download]: new logo, new maps, new weapon looks, bots! (from BloodFrontier), movie recording function (I have to check this out ASAP), rag dolls, new music, and so much more.

Sauerbraten characters

The bots are rather dumb as of now and don not know what a powerup is yet but they're definitely better than no bots at all. What I found most amazing about this release is the characterization of the player models. Each of the three has a little back story. I felt that Sauerbraten had no soul before this release. Now it has a little soul. :)

Mark IV

The tank simulation engine Mark IV [project, web page, blog] v0.80 Alpha-1 is out and first-time playable over network. It however uses FMOD (which can be avoided, see this) and RakNet. Windows users will be able to use the pre-compiled binary.

A little arcade

Atomic Worm has recently been open sourced. It appears to be a Pacman-Snake mix plus different grid types plus the visual style of Transcend. Source available here. It uses the PopCap Framework, which appears to be free software.

Atomic Worm at YouTube

Do you like cruel, hard moon lander games? If yes, OldSkoolGravityGame was made with you in mind! It may look harmless, even retro-pretty on video... but I have felt the pain...
O_O

Portable game packages

DSN

The Damn Small Nexuiz (DSN) project provides a slim version of Nexuiz with the aim to make it playable on netbooks. Deja Vu?

Speaking of reduced weight: Spring RTS Engine Portable is a win32 Spring (RTS engine) package that doesn't touch the registry.

Read More