DevCorner: Superpowers HTML5 collaborative game maker open-sourced!

Great news for HTML5 game developers: a few days ago Superpowers was released under the ISC license.

What is Superpowers? A game development platform (an integrated editor but you can collaborate in realtime online; how cool is that! :D ) for making HTML5 games using TypeScript (a superset of Javascript). But you will also be able to work with other languages, so far support for the well known LÖVE2D is available.

Learn more in this video:


The source is available here and there is also an repository with a few sample games. If you like what they are doing, please consider becoming a supporter.

Looking forward to your new HTML5 games!

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.

Super Space Invader Review

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.

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).

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!

Love2D Tower Defense: Turres Monacorum

Download the mini tower defense game from the github release page and enjoy!

Galaxy Forces: Moon Lander Action!

Galaxy Forces is an open-source moon lander shooter single-/multiplayer game hosted on SourceForge, it is nearly finished.

It is unique of its kind in offering global hiscores and achievements. Replays and AI enemies also available.

Try it. It plays on Win, Mac and Linux.

Godot Winter Game Jam

Godot winter icon

A game dev jam to create a winter-themed open source game was community-initiated at the Godot forums. The (vote-determined) winner will get a budget of USD 50 to have donated to an open source project of their choice.

What is Godot?

Godot editor

Godot is a game engine. No wait, it's actually a game development IDE with its own Lua-based scripting language.

As far as I can tell, it's a promising project that is a bit buggy, especially when it comes to mobile exports. It has some UI flaws (subjectivity warning) but still, open source Godot is more appealing than proprietary Unity 3D.

If you want to try making a game in Godot, I recommend this official tutorial as a starting point. Good luck & great success to you!

What else?

Another way to support Godot: "like" it as a Unity 3D alternative on alternativeTo.

Duck Marines, FOSS remake of ChuChu Rocket

Thanks to Tangram Games for pointing out to us that they just released version 1.0 of their local multiplayer game Duck Marines.

They describe it as:

Duck Marines is a cross-platform free software PC remake of Sonic Team’s ChuChu Rocket.
Duck Marines attempts to recreate the magic from the local multiplayer of ChuChu Rocket while adding new elements like mini games, a level editor, colorful pixel art and more.

But see for yourself:



For those not familiar with the original on the Dreamcast here is a small description of the gameplay:

The goal of the game is to get as many ducks into the submarine of your color. Gray ducks give you one point, gold ducks give multiple points and pink ducks will trigger an event or mini game.
Guide the ducks towards your submarine by placing arrows on the ground. When walking over an arrow ducks will instead walk in the direction the arrow is pointing.
Beware of the blue predators. Predators love to eat ducks and will kill a large number of your ducks if they reach your submarine. Try instead to guide the predators to the other players’ submarines using your arrows.

Source-code (zlib) can be found here, assets are licensed under the CC-by-NC-SA/ND. Build with the great Lua 2D game framework LÖVE by the way.

KeeperRL and OpenIG

Two interesting projects I recently came across:

1. KeeperRL:

Description from the author:

KeeperRL is a Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress inspired dungeon simulator built on top of roguelike mechanics. My vision is that you are a Sauron-like character, searching for ultimate knowledge of destruction. What makes the game different from other RTS is that you can, and are encouraged to, control your main character and lead your minions to an open war. The characters use equipment, scrolls, potions, spells, and other things you would expect in a roguelike. Combat is turn-based and very tactical. The whole world is procedurally generated, and there is adventure mode too.

See a video of the (still in ASCII graphics) action here and the GPL licensed code here. Latest development release can be downloaded here (Win&Linux).

2. OpenIG:



A real classic is being reimplemented as OpenIG (follow the development blog here). Interestingly the original developers have granted the rights to all the game's data to be freely (as in beer I assume) distributed with the new Java based engine.
Time to jump into the 4X games again ;)

Code Combat: Open Source Javascript Tutorial Gamification (In A Good Way)

youtube.com/watch?v=dCOHjERswGw

Code Combat is a javascript programming learning IDE wrapped in a delicious cute RPG/2D RTS packaging that runs in the browser without any plugins. They recently announced their open source/free art release.

The current set of Code Combat tutorials starts with directional movement and activation of pre-programmed behavior, continues with coordinate movement and targeting and conditional behavior and continues towards prediction calculations.

Editor GUI

youtube.com/watch?v=H5u5ga5dHm8

There is an editor, officially described as "broken". I can confirm that the text editor was slow when I tried using it. :)

All in all, a very exciting project. I have noticed a few possible drawbacks so far:

• It's not yet clear which parts will not remain proprietary. It looks like the excellent humor (writing) unfortunately will do so (legal page).
• The music tends to be too exciting to code to.
• There's a CLA requirement for contributing.

What do you think? Persuaded to work on a HTML5 game yourself perhaps, seeing that this performs okay? :)

December RTS updates

Merry Christmas from FreeGamer!

As a nice present from the 0 A.D. team, the new Alpha 15 Osiris was released today:



Lots of great new features and especially multiplayer games should be now much easier to do with hosting improvements and a lobby for browsing available games.

Another open-source RTS engine (using Mono/C# though) has also released a new version: OpenRA. Currently it is still geared toward running an assortment of older Command & Conquer based games, so you need to own these for the data. But this release adds lua scripting for the creation of custom missions, so maybe someone will come up with a libre game to run on this engine.

Last but not least, a new version of Warzone2100 was released about a week ago. This one actually includes some higher resolution textures, which is hopefully the first step to officially integrate all the awesome new art assets from the art revolution project.
Speaking of WZ mods: There is also an interesting new tower-defense mod currently being developed.

Tales of Maj'Eyal (ToME) version 1.1.0 and Steam edition

The great roguelike RPG Tales of Maj'Eyal (ToME) is available as a new version (1.1.0) nicknamed "Full Steam Ahead". Here is a slightly older trailer for version 1.0.5.:



Release highlights:

• New necromancer tree: Animus
• All achievements now feature beautiful 128x128 images
• Improved Alchemist interaction with its golem
• Tons of fixes and balance adjustements
• Many improvements for addon creators, including a way to enable debug mode and a tool (inthe debug menu) to register and upload addons to te4.org directly from the game.
• Includes a Fez. Fezzes are cool!

Interestingly it has also been "greenlit" on the popular game distribution channel Steam, so if you want to donate to the developers you can also do it by buying ToME through this channel. The currently discounted version includes a DLC with an updated UI (and the hint for a Steampunk themed extension) which seems to me like a planned way of funding the development of the game in the future.

Frogatto & Friends looking to be "greenlit" on Steam

We have mentioned in the past a few times that it is a common misconception that FOSS games need to be also "freeware", and in fact the opposite can be quite beneficial to the overall development of a game or the engine it is build on.

The 2D jump & run  Frogatto & Friends has been for sale on mobile platforms for a while now, and its really high quality game-play and graphics are definitely a notch above most other open-source games:



All of it is possible through the use of their awesome open-source engine Anura.

Now they are looking to sell their game also on desktop computers through the very popular Steam digital distribution platform. You can vote for inclusion here.

As far as I am aware this is the first open-source game that actually aims to be sold through this channel, but recently another one, Warsow, was actually approved for inclusion as a freeware title.

As a launch of their "greenlight" campaign, the creators of Frogatto & Friends have started a Q&A session on reddit, where you can learn more about them and their awesome game(s).

Unrelated to that: please also check out our own "sub-reddit" about open-source gaming :)

Valyria Tear 0.6.0 released

I have to admit that we are a bit slow on reporting the news on FOSS gaming projects with we actually host ourselves via the freegamedev.net forums. Valyria Tear is sadly no exception, and their new 0.6.0 release has been out a few days already. Sorry to all whom this may concern.

For those not in the loop, Valyria Tear is based on the engine of Hero of Allacrost and aims to be an all FOSS jRPG. To give you a better idea of the game-play, here is a (slightly older) cool video of it done by some Linux enthusiasts:



(Thanks also to Rootgamer who reminded me of this news).

If you like the new release, give them some praise on our forums!

Stephen Cameron: Space Nerds in Space Interview and Crew Gameplay Video

A 15 minutes long video profile of Stephen Cameron was published on YouTube by Jack Younger - hacker (presumed) at TX/RX Labs.

Stephen Cameron Video Profile

The video includes an interview of Cameron's about his latest project Space Nerds in Space including inspiration and actual authentic gameplay video footage of the crew (highlights at 08:30).

Video thumbnails

Some of Word War Vi's history also is covered in the video (4:00).

Do I need to spell it out? Press that like button if you can! :)

Source: Announcement on the FreeGameDev forums

Fundraising for GPL game Plee the Bear

This is a guest post by Julien Jorge, developer, artist and musician behind the open source indie games Plee the Bear and Andy's Super Great Park, here to present the fundraising campaign he launched for the former.

Some years ago, with the help of three of my friends and anonymous people on the web, I have created Plee the Bear, a great platformer in which you play an angry bear whose son has been kidnapped by god. Here is a guy hard to brave! You sure will jump in this amazing journey to find and rescue your son. Because you want to rescue him, don't you? Or to slap him? Maybe both….

The game was a spare time project for a long time, then we recently decided to create a real, full, complete, fun and original version out of the prototype. We have thus created our company, Stuffomatic, published a first game and now we are launching a fundraising campaign for Plee the Bear!

The prototypes of the game have always been released for Windows and Linux as free software, available under the terms of the GNU GPL and the CC by-sa licenses. The latest version contains three levels of the storyline and four mini-games; and has already generated very positive criticisms (e.g. on The Linux Game Tome). Players loved the fun, the graphics and the music; other indie developers were pleasantly surprised by the technical skills and the details of the game; and people in the free software movement appreciated the overall process and the quality of the resources, remarkable for a free game.

All these feedbacks motivated us to complete the game and to launch a fundraising campaign to help the development. The campaign is organized in order to implement the new contents of the game one after the other, each time with a new fundraiser. So, for the initial one, the feature you are welcome to support is a complete refresh of the existing work. You can see the details on the project's page on OpenFunding but let me show you how the game will look:

To be compared with the current release:

(The screen is larger in the new version, it's not just Plee who is smaller…) 

The animations will also be reworked. For example, here is a comparison of the changes in the animation of Plee walking. The old version is on the bright stripes, the new one is in the black stripes:

If you are a game developer, you may have already used some free resources from websites like OpenGameArt.org or Freesound.org. If you are a gamer, you may have played games using the resources of such websites. In both cases, you are certainly interested by our process consisting of releasing each part of the game under a free license. Actually, we have recently started to supply OpenGameArt.org with our assets.

So, if you like our project:

• give us some money for the next development steps,
• give us feedback about the process to help us improving it,
• share this announcement with your neighbors.

This way, we will all go toward a fun and good game :)

Today: Glamour, or how to hide irony about gender stereotypes very well...

Or something like that... because as much as I think FOSS games should cater to the other ermm... 2nd out of three(?) gender, I am not sure if this is meant ironic or not (description of the game Glamour):

You are Maddeline, a young princess just turned 16. Now you're old enough to attend the royal balls and your fairy godmother will help you get ready for the most exciting dances.

Watch out your way while walking around this amazing city full of filthy foes. They may harm your look. You wouldn't like to reach the ball all covered with dirt.

Visit the Make-up, Shoe, Dress and Accessory Castle to find the most beautiful outfits and win the Prince Charming heart.

At least I see relatively little pink on that screen-shot...

Source-code is available here for those that wonder...

*stalkes slowly away*

But -BAM-... here is something clearly more manly:

Unvanquished Alpha 19

-BAM- check the alpha 19 changelog -BAM- Oh and the soon to released AlienArena Tactical also sound like a game for -BAM- real men!

Hmm BAM?

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, funded!

The self described open-source rogue-like survivalcraft / driving game in a sci-fi zombie apocalypse has successfully reached its goal on Kickstarter, and one of the developers will now be able to work on it full-time for a few months to implement for example a back-end for proper graphics.

But see and hear about it yourself:


The first stretch-goal is close too, with 12 days remaining to pledge money towards this cool project.

Less rosy does it look for the previously featured Data Dealer project. With only 48 hours to go, but still about 10k missing it will be a close finish if at all. They got some remarkable press lately though and jumped up about 10k in the last days, so it is still possible. So if you haven't done it yet, pledge here.

Data Dealer, an interesting project to fund!

The the last Kickstarter game project we featured was sadly not successful and with only 11 days to go it doesn't look too good for Data Dealer either. But this HTML5 and CC-by-SA licensed game project comes with a pretty cool idea and is quite playable already.



It centers around the idea that services like Facebook & Google really arn't in the business of bringing you a good service (aka "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold") and makes a ironic game out of that.

Here is game-play trailer to give you an better idea:



Or try the current demo on their webpage.

Now of course as we have all recently learned (or at least got confirmation about), the reality is even more twisted than just the private business side of things. But over the revelations of the mass surveillance by the NSA & Co., we should still not forget that all those big internet companies arn't victims by far either.

P.S.: My best wishes go out to Mr. Snowden! You are a hero of our generation.

Lost Sky Tactical J-RPG [PyGame]

Lost Sky is a PyGame-based Tactical J-RPG that runs on Linux, OS X and Windows.

To play on a system that has mercurial and pygame installed, run:

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/featheredmelody/lost-sky-project-public
cd lost-sky-project-public/Story\ of\ a\ Lost\ Sky/
chmod +x srpg.py
./srpg.py

Lost Sky screenshots

Video: Lost Sky Gameplay: Tactical jRPG on Linux [PyGame] 

Story of a Lost Sky is a Turn Based Strategy RPG with gameplay that is similar to Fire Emblem. Units are placed on a tile map and each side takes turns moving and attacking. Outside the battle map, the player is able to customize their characters and equip new spells and traits.

This project was discovered by seeing a link banner on Valyria Tear's blog. Yay networking!

Code License: New BSD
Content License: Various: PD, CC-BY 3.0, CC-Sampling+ (non-free), Unknown

Hedgewars 0.9.19 released

Everyone's favorite clone of worm-warfare, Hedgewars recently got a rather big new release as one of the developers pointed out to us by email.

One of the new level themes for Hedgewars 0.9.19

The changes are quite extensive, so instead of failing to summarize them here, check out the above linked quite extensive original release announcement.

You can also have a look at this fan-made trailer if you enjoy cheezy stuff ;)