Matter Sorter
Simple Machines Game
Forces of Flight
Cute Character Crowdfunding (CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Remember Justin Nichol's amazing Portrait Kickstarter? He's up to no good again:
Back the icon collection on indiegogo.
Horde of Cuteness! is an ongoing crowdfunded high resolution character icon collection and the indiegogo campaign will add 2 heroes, 5 monsters, and 3 boss monsters chosen by the backers.
All the characters will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 license, and will be made available as .pngs with transparent backgrounds, and will have include .kra or .xcf source files for editing the characters yourself. All new images will be 2000px by 2000px.There's a month left and only 590$ out of 1000$ missing.
Back the icon collection on indiegogo.
DevCorner: Atomic Game Engine MIT (Urho3D fork) and Godot 2.0
First off (and you probably read it elsewhere before): The awesome Godot game engine got a really awesome 2.0 release a few weeks ago. It also got independent of it's original developers (who stay active in development), and the first larger commercial game with it was released on Steam just a few days ago.
Fresh of the press is a FOSS release of an pretty awesome competitor though:
The Atomic Game Engine was just released fully under the MIT license! Its render engine is a fork of the pretty nice Urho3D renderer, but it includes an cross-platform integrated development environment similar to Godot:
Dive into the source code here. Similar to Godot it features some neat platform support: Linux, Android, WebGL, Windows, iOS and OSX (resorted for significance ;) ); but unlike it you have much more and more common scripting languages at your disposal: JavaScript, TypeScript, C++, and C# scripting in the works. Especially the latter could be interesting if someone manages to make an Unity3D compatibility layer for migrating and open-sourcing Unity games...
For a nice overview, don't miss the GamesFromScratch video and introduction tutorial (from back in December 2015 when it was not yet MIT licensed):
Fresh of the press is a FOSS release of an pretty awesome competitor though:
The Atomic Game Engine was just released fully under the MIT license! Its render engine is a fork of the pretty nice Urho3D renderer, but it includes an cross-platform integrated development environment similar to Godot:
 |
| Looks nice, but where is the Linux binary release? :( |
For a nice overview, don't miss the GamesFromScratch video and introduction tutorial (from back in December 2015 when it was not yet MIT licensed):
Best Open Source Top-Down Space Shooter : Super Space Invader
Lasers, rockets, shields, health regeneration, pixels. You know. The good stuff. Just nicely packaged with levels of just the right duration and hardness, persistent upgrades, shaders, reverb...
Two buttons are enough to play, since that was one of the themes of Ludum Dare #34, in which the game came #74 among 1638 jam entries.
Supser Space Invader was made with LÖVE (v0.9) and thus runs on Linux, OS X, Windows.
The source is available on GitHub under zlib/libpng.
SuperTux 0.4.0 Milestone 2
Over ten years after the last stable release of SuperTux (0.1.3 released July 2005) the SuperTux team have announced the release of the first stable version in the Milestone 2 series.
It has been a long road for the project, and a lot has changed as the engine seems to have been largely rewritten to make it suitable for more advanced graphics and scripting. Whilst the existing content has been updated, it would seem that the one area in which the project is short is new tilesets and levels, with only a partially complete 2nd forest overworld of the (originally planned) 7 desired worlds.
That's where the community comes in though. With a stable game to work with, hopefully players and artists can combine to extend the game and make it enjoyable for generations to come.
My own 15 year old son remembers SuperTux 0.1.3 fondly as, he says, the best game he played as a young child.
Compared to 0.1.3, this release features:And of course we updated the official levels to make use of all the new features.
- a nearly completely rewritten game engine based on OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL2, ...
- support for translations
- in-game manager for downloadable add-ons and translations
- Bonus Island III, a for now unfinished Forest Island and the development levels in Incubator Island
- a final boss in Icy Island
- new and improved soundtracks and sound effects
- new badguys, bonuses and power-ups (air-, earth- and ice-flower)
- a halloween tilemap
- new graphic effects (glowing objects, particles, ...)
- levels and worldmaps are scriptable using squirrel
- much more game objects: trampolines, switches, portable stones, wind, moving platforms, ... - most of them have scripting APIs
- improved statistics
- many invisible changes, like unit tests, efficiency improvements and more bugfixes
- much more...
 |
| SuperTux 0.4.0 Overworld |
That's where the community comes in though. With a stable game to work with, hopefully players and artists can combine to extend the game and make it enjoyable for generations to come.
My own 15 year old son remembers SuperTux 0.1.3 fondly as, he says, the best game he played as a young child.
3 Super Monkey Ball Alternatives - Open Sphere Rolling Games
Marbles have fascinated the population of the blue marble for centuries. Today, we take a look at three digital variants that are open source and playable cross-platform.
Veraball
The newest addition to the group of open source ball-rolling games is minimal and was made using the Godot engine.
Rock and jazz music accompanies your through the only two levels so far. None of them are super hard, making Veraball the most beginner-friendly game of the bunch.
Windows (both portable and installer) and Linux releases are available but since Godot Engine runs on Mac OS X, you can play it on that platform as well using the source.
irrlamb
A magical engine powers the blue sphere from the inside, allowing it to roll and jump without reasonable explanation. Its goal is to touch other glass balls filled with yellow light by balancing towards them.
You steer the blue sphere. But to what end? Deliver the coup de grâce to failed experiments? Free trapped spirits? Harvest sleeping souls to grow in power? Is it a grim prognosis about the effects of future commercialized space travel and interplanetary colonization?
Welcome to irrlamb. The atmosphere is mostly dark and dungeon-like, sometimes abstract, always at least a bit magical. The two skater parks feel clinically sanitized (no graffiti).
There are around 20 levels starting from beginner-friendly to absolutely insane.
There have been two releases this year (0.2 and 0.2.1). Most of the changes were usability improvements and bugfixes, although some levels have been added as well.
irrlamb 0.2.1 is available for Linux and Windows. Windows users have to manually install OpenAL.
For creating own levels, there is an export script available for Blender.
Neverball has been around for a while. There are easy levels, there are hard levels, there are levels that were apparently made to challenge the game's developers.
Many levels take place in space, on grass squares floating under the sky, above the sea or above a city at night. Of our three games, this one is least suitable for those with acrophobia.
There is a lot of content (326 maps minus Neverputt levels) and only a small part of it is accessibly due to my lack of balancing skills. So I present to you the most and least favorite aspects of Neverball, as seen by a player with newbie skills:
Best: 1. The oh so many levels! 2. Different ball models available, some have character (by containing characters), making it easier to have some kind of emotional connection to the game. No animated cute animals though unfortunately.
Worst: 1. The old looking non-baked textures of the basic levels 2. The camera (does not allow you to zoom, moves in disturbing ways) and consequently the controls.
"If only projects X, Y and Z could join forces instead of trying to re-invent the wheel!" - what an annoying thing to say, don't you think? I hope you got the chance to play irrlamb, Neverball and Veraball - and if not I hope this review brought you closer to them - so that you can appreciate the different feels to the gameplay and scenery.
All I really want now are video tutorials for creating new levels...
Are there any open source games with similar mechanics that I missed? Are there proprietary games that developers should consider taking inspiration from other than Super Monkey Ball? Please let us know in the comments!
Neverball
Neverball has been around for a while. There are easy levels, there are hard levels, there are levels that were apparently made to challenge the game's developers.
Many levels take place in space, on grass squares floating under the sky, above the sea or above a city at night. Of our three games, this one is least suitable for those with acrophobia.
There is a lot of content (326 maps minus Neverputt levels) and only a small part of it is accessibly due to my lack of balancing skills. So I present to you the most and least favorite aspects of Neverball, as seen by a player with newbie skills:
Best: 1. The oh so many levels! 2. Different ball models available, some have character (by containing characters), making it easier to have some kind of emotional connection to the game. No animated cute animals though unfortunately.
Worst: 1. The old looking non-baked textures of the basic levels 2. The camera (does not allow you to zoom, moves in disturbing ways) and consequently the controls.
Conclusion
"If only projects X, Y and Z could join forces instead of trying to re-invent the wheel!" - what an annoying thing to say, don't you think? I hope you got the chance to play irrlamb, Neverball and Veraball - and if not I hope this review brought you closer to them - so that you can appreciate the different feels to the gameplay and scenery.
All I really want now are video tutorials for creating new levels...
Are there any open source games with similar mechanics that I missed? Are there proprietary games that developers should consider taking inspiration from other than Super Monkey Ball? Please let us know in the comments!
Warsow 2.0 is now almost fully FOSS!
Great news for the FOSS enthusiasts: after many years of constant nagging the latest release of the great parcour/arena FPS Warsow has now most of it's artistic content under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 license (with a few remaining but clearly marked ones under CC-by-ND).
You can find more screen-shots in the above link and the full changelog here.
Rendering speed was also increased (claimed to be 30-50% faster) and a movement tutorial is now included.
So far I always recommended Xonotic over Warsow as the coolest (=most competitive; Red Eclipse is also cool, but much more casual) open-source arena FPS, but I think I might reconsider this now...
Happy fragging :p
 |
| Also updated particle effects in Warsow 2.0 |
Rendering speed was also increased (claimed to be 30-50% faster) and a movement tutorial is now included.
So far I always recommended Xonotic over Warsow as the coolest (=most competitive; Red Eclipse is also cool, but much more casual) open-source arena FPS, but I think I might reconsider this now...
Happy fragging :p
Top 3 Open Source Pinball Games
UPDATE Dec 1st, 2015: 1. Added Libre Pinball, see Honorable Mentions below. 2. Added conclusion section.
UPDATE Jul 17th, 2016: Updated Emilia Pinball links
Nexus Pinball
Started only a month ago, Nova Pinball's simple sole 2D table is a lot of fun and development has made good progress.
Emilia Pinball
The game has 4 perspectives (F5-F8)
The models are very low-poly, which is fine and fast but the textures are sinfully low-resolution. However editing textures appears to be simple in existing tables, simply by overwriting them with higher-resolution files, as demonstrated with the angry gnu head in the screenshot above.
Creating new tables requires an editor, which I unfortunately was not able to compile yet (possibly due to lack of old Qt libraries).
There is a zombie/horror/Halloween table, which unfortunately contains non-free content.
Linball
The 2D Linball table is crazy fast but suffers from some sounds ripped from proprietary games (maybe there's more non-free content).
Honorable mentions
Libre Pinball (thread) is very atmospheric but has no missions and only very few table elements right now. It was made using the Godot Engine.
Sadly, Visual Pinball only runs on Windows (wine page).
Vector Pinball for Android unfortunately has no instructions for desktop/Linux compilation.
Devil's Pinball is a Blender-made pinball table. It's quite buggy when played in recent Blender and there is no license information.
Conclusion
I find the open pinball games on Linux more entertaining than I expected them to be. The major downside is decoration and context: while the themes of some tables are intriguing, they unfortunately exist in a widescreen world without a proper background that adds to the experience.
And of course some accessible (video) documentation on how to create new tables would be a huge plus.
Got theme ideas for open source pinball tables? Write them in the comments!
Naev, Valyria Tear, Wyrmsun, ReTux
Wymrsun 1.6.0 was recently released (announcement on our forums and on Steam). Wyrmsun is inspired by the original Warcraft games and many reviewers on Steam compare it to Warcraft II. The project continues a steady development pace which is always a good sign so I encourage RTS fans to try it out.
Naev 0.6.1 has been released. After a long period without releases until release 0.6.0 appeared in March, this follow up release indicates a return to regular progress for the project. Naev is a 2D space trading and combat game.
I couldn't find a more recent video but here's a bit of a development log of some features for the 0.6.0 release.
Speaking of resurgent projects, Valyria Tear has some news.
Onto more things slightly more dubiously open source in nature...
ReTux 0.2 has been released. ReTux is a new Super Tux inspired game. It is a completely rewritten (in Python) codebase although uses many of the assets from the original Super Tux so naturally people will mistake the two despite the significant differences. I already covered the IndieGoGo campaign in a previous article.
I'm not really on board with the way the developer Onpon4 is now soliciting $20 for access to the code. I think he's both hurting himself by limiting exposure of the game (you need a password to access the downloads) as well as asking for a fairly significant sum in an age where AAA games are of a similar price a year after release (and regularly on offer, as any Humble Bundle or Steam user will know).
I would say he should just get it on Steam, sell it there, and be open source outside of that. Perhaps have additional levels in the Steam version but accept that charging for the source code is as pointless as it is ineffective.
 |
| Wyrmsum |
Naev 0.6.1 has been released. After a long period without releases until release 0.6.0 appeared in March, this follow up release indicates a return to regular progress for the project. Naev is a 2D space trading and combat game.
I couldn't find a more recent video but here's a bit of a development log of some features for the 0.6.0 release.
Speaking of resurgent projects, Valyria Tear has some news.
The most noticeable change is that I killed a few days ago a very nasty bug that was there from the beginning, making the lua threads never freed from memory. This means the game won't end up anymore swallowing gigs of memory for nothing and crash due to some memory overflow.Well that does sound like a bit of a killjoy, so good to see it fixed. Other changes are in the blog post.
Onto more things slightly more dubiously open source in nature...
ReTux 0.2 has been released. ReTux is a new Super Tux inspired game. It is a completely rewritten (in Python) codebase although uses many of the assets from the original Super Tux so naturally people will mistake the two despite the significant differences. I already covered the IndieGoGo campaign in a previous article.
 |
| ReTux |
I would say he should just get it on Steam, sell it there, and be open source outside of that. Perhaps have additional levels in the Steam version but accept that charging for the source code is as pointless as it is ineffective.
Games with G (Gorynlich & Gigalomania)
Great news for people who like GGGGames ;)
The author of the new action roguelike dungeon crawler kind of darwen mayham game Gorynlich was so kind to inform us his game. It comes with this funny trailer (and some great programmer's art :p ):
The code is licensed under the LGPL, while the assets are only freeware right now. But the author seems to be open to look into replacing the assets with Creative Commons licensed ones if someone is interested in doing so.
Gorynlich is done by the same author as the ASCII game Goblin Hack by the way.
Another nice game starting with G, is the awesome remake of the oldie Megalomania, appropriately called Gigalomania!
The author is still looking for improved art asset contributions, but the game itself is already quite playable (even on mobile devices and a bunch of other rare systems!). Also check out the other two cool games by the same developer: Erebus RPG and Conquests (a Civ like game).
The author of the new action roguelike dungeon crawler kind of darwen mayham game Gorynlich was so kind to inform us his game. It comes with this funny trailer (and some great programmer's art :p ):
The code is licensed under the LGPL, while the assets are only freeware right now. But the author seems to be open to look into replacing the assets with Creative Commons licensed ones if someone is interested in doing so.
Gorynlich is done by the same author as the ASCII game Goblin Hack by the way.
Another nice game starting with G, is the awesome remake of the oldie Megalomania, appropriately called Gigalomania!
The author is still looking for improved art asset contributions, but the game itself is already quite playable (even on mobile devices and a bunch of other rare systems!). Also check out the other two cool games by the same developer: Erebus RPG and Conquests (a Civ like game).
OpenDungeons and FreeOrion updates plus ReTux
A couple of long standing open source game projects have received significant updates.
OpenDungeons, an open source dungeon management game, has seen release 0.6 make it out the door. Release highlights from the changelog:
The project has some very regular contributors (both programming and art) and the game has multiplayer support which the developers test with the occasional weekend virtual lan party. OpenDungeons has certainly gone from strength to strength in the last year.
FreeOrion version 0.4.5 (announcement with changelog) wraps up the last year's worth of development. Much of the work seems to have been motivated by trying to make the game more fun to play — "performance, responsiveness, AI, balancing etc." —which is nice to see. At some point a project has to stop pushing new features and work on improving the game experience.
I couldn't find any screenshots of 0.4.5 to share, but here's a recent gameplay video posted on YouTube which should give an idea, although he's well into a game at this point:
Finally, and a little too late unfortunately, here's some coverage of ReTux. At first glance, it would seem somebody has taken Super Tux and tried to profit off of it. However, author Julian Merchant (onpon4 on the FGD forums) has written a new engine from scratch in Python. Whilst there are the obvious similarities with the original Super Tux, due to ReTux using many of the same graphics and sounds, there are a number of notable gameplay changes many of which can be seen in the 'Concept Castle' video (I really think his IndieGoGo campaign should have used this video at the very beginning of it).
Julian only raised $378 in the 30 days the campaign lasted, which was very short of the $50,000 goal. Reasons for this will be likely poor coverage (no FG article!) but also probably the perception that it was basically the same as Super Tux. For example, the IGG page starts with a video which the first 2 minutes or so (aside from the change to the fireflower) could easily be recreated by substituting the Super Tux logo for ReTux.
I do think avoiding the more popular media sites (e.g. no YouTube video) hurt the campaign. I can find little-to-no mention of ReTux when searching for it.
It also highlights one of the problems with developing Free games i.e. generally there's no money in it. Julian is obviously passionate about the concept, having done so much work on it already, and I hope he continues with it. As to where he goes from here? I would suggest perhaps trying to get it greenlit on Steam or another platform where he can solicit a small fee from players whilst still maintaining the open source status of the project - a great example being Tales of Maj’Eyal which is also selling well on Steam.
Don't give up Julian. Persistence is the key to success with any endeavour. You just have to find the right path.
OpenDungeons, an open source dungeon management game, has seen release 0.6 make it out the door. Release highlights from the changelog:
- New spell logic with cooldown, targets and cost management
- Fancy new spells: Heal, Explosion and Haste
- Particle effects!
- Reworked library logic and made research order configurable
- New creature overlays that show the creatures' mood
- Customisable creature sound effects!
- Doors to better block enemies and macromanage allies
- In-game settings menu support!
- New claimed walls graphics and various other graphical improvements
- New minimap camera with real-time rendering
- Dedicated server support with command-line parameters
 |  | |
| Explosions! Spells! | The research tree |
The project has some very regular contributors (both programming and art) and the game has multiplayer support which the developers test with the occasional weekend virtual lan party. OpenDungeons has certainly gone from strength to strength in the last year.
FreeOrion version 0.4.5 (announcement with changelog) wraps up the last year's worth of development. Much of the work seems to have been motivated by trying to make the game more fun to play — "performance, responsiveness, AI, balancing etc." —which is nice to see. At some point a project has to stop pushing new features and work on improving the game experience.
I couldn't find any screenshots of 0.4.5 to share, but here's a recent gameplay video posted on YouTube which should give an idea, although he's well into a game at this point:
Finally, and a little too late unfortunately, here's some coverage of ReTux. At first glance, it would seem somebody has taken Super Tux and tried to profit off of it. However, author Julian Merchant (onpon4 on the FGD forums) has written a new engine from scratch in Python. Whilst there are the obvious similarities with the original Super Tux, due to ReTux using many of the same graphics and sounds, there are a number of notable gameplay changes many of which can be seen in the 'Concept Castle' video (I really think his IndieGoGo campaign should have used this video at the very beginning of it).
Julian only raised $378 in the 30 days the campaign lasted, which was very short of the $50,000 goal. Reasons for this will be likely poor coverage (no FG article!) but also probably the perception that it was basically the same as Super Tux. For example, the IGG page starts with a video which the first 2 minutes or so (aside from the change to the fireflower) could easily be recreated by substituting the Super Tux logo for ReTux.
I do think avoiding the more popular media sites (e.g. no YouTube video) hurt the campaign. I can find little-to-no mention of ReTux when searching for it.
It also highlights one of the problems with developing Free games i.e. generally there's no money in it. Julian is obviously passionate about the concept, having done so much work on it already, and I hope he continues with it. As to where he goes from here? I would suggest perhaps trying to get it greenlit on Steam or another platform where he can solicit a small fee from players whilst still maintaining the open source status of the project - a great example being Tales of Maj’Eyal which is also selling well on Steam.
Don't give up Julian. Persistence is the key to success with any endeavour. You just have to find the right path.
Devcorner: Macros Are Evil
The joys of programming - hours spent scratching one's head whilst trying to figure out why the seemingly correct code does not produce correct results.
Hi, Charlie here. I used to post often.
Where was I? Ah, yes, this nugget of brain fudgery from the VDrift forums posted by NaN:
For the answer visit the thread, I won't spoil it here. Instead, I'll post a screenshot, also sourced from said forums and taken by Stunt Rally author CrystalH.
For those who don't know, Stunt Rally is a friendly fork of VDrift.
Hi, Charlie here. I used to post often.
Where was I? Ah, yes, this nugget of brain fudgery from the VDrift forums posted by NaN:
So I've spent some time today try to figure out why cars are still flying off in random directions when hitting curbs sometimes.
It turns out it is a bug in Bullet, to be more specific in the SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD macro.Code:#define SIMD_PI btScalar(3.1415926535897932384626433832795029)
#define SIMD_2_PI btScalar(2.0) * SIMD_PI
#define SIMD_HALF_PI (SIMD_PI * btScalar(0.5))
#define SIMD_RADS_PER_DEG (SIMD_2_PI / btScalar(360.0))
#define SIMD_DEGS_PER_RAD (btScalar(360.0) / SIMD_2_PI)
The first one to spot it gets a virtual cookie.
For the answer visit the thread, I won't spoil it here. Instead, I'll post a screenshot, also sourced from said forums and taken by Stunt Rally author CrystalH.
Mini Sci-Fi Open Source Tower Defense Game
Purely by chance, I found an obviously abandoned but still fun to play mini tower defense with a skippable tutorial level and two playable missions, beautiful graphics and performance settings.
To be a master is to spam en mass
So you place towers and the shoot enemies that move towards your base. I know this! Being an impatient player type, I skipped past the tutorial and was annihilated in level 1.
Short enough messages in a hard enough tutorial level
The degree of my destruction was such, that I was thankful for the tutorial being there at all. Even though I did die in it, it taught me enough about the all-or-nothing early game (which some might refer as to "unbalanced") to get my strategy right.
Turn off for speed. Turn on for awesome!
You get 3 towers: that allows you to build more tower, one that allows you to shoot more and one that shoots. You can block paths and create mazes. There are no tower upgrades and that's okay.
All the plot. Space to continue. Take that non-skip-able intro video AAA games!
Mission #3 is not possible to win (prove me wrong) but it was a great experience to find that I was able to beat the tutorial mission after all. By deviating from the given instructions! If that's not freedom (besides being open source) then I don't know what is!
Yeah right...
Come to think of it, the ridiculousness of level 3 practically speaks "dear player, you should totally fork and make new levels!"
Made with love2d
The last commit to Turres Monacorum was in May 2014 and the game was made at a game jam. My experience dictates that this won't be picked up by the original developers any more but to any player with love2d installed, it will come as a wonderful, visually polished snack!
Download the mini tower defense game from the github release page and enjoy!
Top Futuristic Open Source Racing Games on Linux
F-Zero and Wipeout set the standard for the futuristic sci-fi racing games genre and inspire many game developers.
Over the years, four projects of that genre were started and developed to a playable state that are now open source code:
H-Craft by Irrgheist is a free sci-fi racer with IAP on Android. It is built with the Irrlicht engine and was recently released as free software with freeware data.
While gameplay is simple without pickups, boosts or weapons, the campaign keeps it interesting. The 180°-Turns used in H-Craft level design are very refreshing to the genre.
CoreBreach is a commercial anti-gravity racing game with combat gameplay. There is a freeware dataset that allows compiling and playing a simpler-looking version.
Being an Objective C project, it was unusual to compile for me on latest Arch Linux but possible. Campaign mode, weapons and split-screen multiplayer make it cover many bases.
Racer is the only project with 100% free as in freedom data, yet unfortunately it does not compile on current Arch Linux.
Of our four projects, this is the only that has the classic drive-over boost fields.
Ecksdee is the oldest of the bunch and has challenging time trial single-player gameplay.
There are weapon pickups but without AI or human competitors they serve no purpose yet.
Project Comparison
| H-Craft | CoreBreach | Racer* | Ecksdee | |
| Latest Version | 2015-02-23 (1.3) | 2012-11-30 (git) | 2010-10-10 (r349) | 2006-11-24 (0.0.9) |
| Campaign Mode | yes | yes | no | no |
| Split-Screen Multiplayer | no | yes | yes | no |
| Weapons | no | yes | no | yes |
| AI | yes | yes | no | no |
| Gamepad Support | yes | yes | yes | no |
| Menu UI Look | good | ok | good | ok |
| Music | yes | yes | no | yes |
| Sounds | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Linux Builds or Compiling | not tested, build used | complicated but compiles | fails | fails, win32 build/wine used |
| Art Asset License(s) | Mostly no-modify-no-distribute | no-distribution, GPL, CC-BY 3.0 | CC-BY-SA 3.0 | GPL, CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-NC-ND |
| Is It Cool? | yes | yes | yes | yes |
Related projects
Stunt Rally has a F-Zero-esque antigrav vehicles and futuristic levels but primarily it's a car racing game. The default physics don't seem to be working for a futuristic racing style.
The cool Blender Game Engine project RGP has it's .blend file available but it does not have license information. The .blend contains no audio and only one level without AI.
HexGL is pretty but has no sound, no ai, only one level and is CC 3.0 BY-NC licensed (including code) at the moment. If anybody is interested in contributing: the developer indicated interest in the MIT license.
TheRush seem to be Windows-only and does not run in Wine.
SDL2 FPS & on Finding New Open Source Games
I took a quick look whether one could find some open source games news (new game projects to be specific) by sorting SourceForge game projects by date but no luck, only established projects seem to show up there.
So I did the same on GitHub, and after making educated guesses whether projects might be worth clicking based on their title and short description, I f ound graphitemaster/neothyne.
The project uses SDL2, is about half a year old, doesn't have shooting functionality but at least movement feels kind of nice and definitely fast. In fact I'm honestly surprised that SDL is usable for 3D.
What surprised me even more that it compiles in mere seconds.
To come back to the point of finding games: My impression is that development is getting faster, projects are getting more but also less ambitious (read: more realistic to achieve) and less care is being given to licenses but at the same time more legal resources are being used because of OpenGameArt's and Freesound's popularity.
Personally, I have been using old onboard graphics for two years or more (no chance to run anything interesting 3D) because I'd prefer to upgrade from a HTC Wildfire (Buzz) to a OnePlus One, rather than buying a new Power Supply and Graphics card, having a louder computer and the knowledge that it's using more electricity.
This is also the reason why the above video is so tiny. :) No 720p 3D for my GPU.
If you find it interesting to browse through lists of game projects, trying to find a playable one that suits your interest, I recommend the GitHub search. Just don't rely on the "game" search key too much and imagine what the developer might use to describe it (probably genre names...).
For your entertainment, a list of "game" project short descriptions from GitHub.
So I did the same on GitHub, and after making educated guesses whether projects might be worth clicking based on their title and short description, I f ound graphitemaster/neothyne.
The project uses SDL2, is about half a year old, doesn't have shooting functionality but at least movement feels kind of nice and definitely fast. In fact I'm honestly surprised that SDL is usable for 3D.
Neothyne is an attempt at getting back to the roots of good old twitch shooting akin to that of Quake World..It certainly feels more like Cube 1 or Quake, rather than OpenArena, Sauerbraten or Nexuiz.
What surprised me even more that it compiles in mere seconds.
To come back to the point of finding games: My impression is that development is getting faster, projects are getting more but also less ambitious (read: more realistic to achieve) and less care is being given to licenses but at the same time more legal resources are being used because of OpenGameArt's and Freesound's popularity.
Personally, I have been using old onboard graphics for two years or more (no chance to run anything interesting 3D) because I'd prefer to upgrade from a HTC Wildfire (Buzz) to a OnePlus One, rather than buying a new Power Supply and Graphics card, having a louder computer and the knowledge that it's using more electricity.
This is also the reason why the above video is so tiny. :) No 720p 3D for my GPU.
If you find it interesting to browse through lists of game projects, trying to find a playable one that suits your interest, I recommend the GitHub search. Just don't rely on the "game" search key too much and imagine what the developer might use to describe it (probably genre names...).
For your entertainment, a list of "game" project short descriptions from GitHub.
- Actual game for the Capstrong DePaul capstone team
- recreating cs203-game1 repository because of a corruption in the original repo that I can't figure out how to fix atm
- the tic tac toe game on node.js
- Survival game
- kouluprojekti2
- Hotline Miami inspiered HTML5/JS game for school project
- Island is a programming game designed as a support for Software Engineering classes
- game
- Just a little game I'm working on
- Card game...
What's your favorite? Can you find anything better?
