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.

Actraiser

The Short

Pros
- Awesome hybrid of a God/City Sim with an action platformer
- Music is amazing
- Graphics for the platforming segments are quite pretty
- Getting better towns levels your avatar, making you even cooler in the platforming segments
- Battery saves your game
- Like the box says, "Create order from chaos!" That totally happens. Sort of.

Cons
- City/God Sim segments seem under fleshed out
- Platforming segments have a really weird difficulty curve and controls are a bit clunky
- Shooting star magic negates half the game (ie IT'S TOO GOOD)
- Really deserved an amazing sequel, got stupid Actraiser 2 instead

Before Grumpy Cat, there was Grumpy Tree.

The Long

Enix really knocked it out of the park with the SNES. While their relationship with the NES will probably be best remembered by the Dragon Warrior games, on the SNES Enix was just like "Aw, screw it, let's make games with RPG elements in every genre ever." And they did. And it was rad. 

A common theme across these games was restoration, one that permeated the Actraiser games, their later Soul Blazer/Illusion of Gaia/Terrawhatever that game is called games. Of them all, Actraiser came first, in what we would now call "launch window." In Japan it came out about a month after the Super Famicom hit, and in the US it was the holiday season following the SNES's release. So this is a really early SNES game is what I'm saying.

And guess what? For being a near launch-title, it's one of the best games on the system, mashing genre's together like some deranged Jamba Juice employee does with fruit.

This review has already gotten off the wall, so I'd better just get on with it.

And you wonder why your real estate market crashed. YOU NAMED YOUR TOWN '"BLOODPOOL."

Actraiser puts you in the role of God. As in the literal, capital "G" "God," in a battle against Satan himself. That is, this happens if you are playing the Japanese version. In the US you're just the "Master" and the final boss is "Tanzra," but it's pretty obvious what's going on here.

As God/Master, you live in a flying cloud city and help your citizens of this magical world expand their cities, purge monsters from the world, and just generally expand into rampant overpopulation. It's pretty great.

How do you do this, you ask? Well, since you are the literal God, who in this game is sort of an incorporeal twinkling star thing with a baby cherub sidekick, you posses a badass warrior avatar to go murder monsters for you, because you are God and you can't be bothered. Every platforming segment starts and ends with God breathing life into this awesome stone statue (or unbreathing, at the end) and then kicking butt. I dunno why, but that's rad.

God's deadliest foe: angry floating faces. Also, is that one a cat?

The game follows a fairly simple pattern:

- Go to new area

- Warp down as God/Avatar/Master/Whatever and kill the boss monster so your people can populate

- Help the people expand the city, purge other monster lairs, and get some "plot"

- Usually by doing this another big beastie has appeared, so then you go back down again and kill this guy too.

- Move to the next city. Repeat 5-6 times (I can't be bothered to look it up) and you win the game. Yay!

Despite it appearing formulaic, the game is anything but. Each city provides new challenges and problems that you, as the Master, have to help your subjects deal with. As divinity you have the power to use the elements of nature to kick butt: Lightning to blast bushes to push city expansion (or kill baddies), Wind to blow...windmills, Rain to put out fires, Earthquake to destroy everything or change the shape of the world itself, or...actually I think that's it. Maybe there's some fire move that melts ice, I don't remember.

Most of the time spent over the city you're your chubby cherubic minion, who floats around and can down baddies with his extremely weak crossbow. Killing enemies is a temporary thing to get them to stop harassing your cities (and some enemies get genuinely difficult), but the real goal is to clear a path to direct your villagers to get to the monster "lairs" (read: spawn points) and seal them (read: kill the spawns). While they do this they automatically expand, gain in population, and find you items that they offer up to you as a devotion of their fealty and faith.

And sometimes they're sad and whiny.

There are usually two main villagers in each city who act as spokespeople for your followers (I guess these guys are like prophets or something?), but mostly you just see them as tiny dots. You have minimal influence over what they build where, though you can guide the city's expansion directions (as in, point them towards monster lairs) as well as provide some bonuses as you find more items (music makes them happy, grain makes them expand/get more population faster, etc.).

What is worth noting is that, despite these guys being tiny little pixels on the map, some of the stories they tell are genuinely touching. One devout follower risks his life to help other villagers and is on the brink of death. Knowing you can't restore his life (or just afraid to ask for that), he instead asks that you shed your tears on him (read: summon rain on him) before he dies. He then passes away, and the next time the village prays there's only one person. It's actually kind of sad!

My favorite village is where the people go off and worship some other deity instead of you, so that the temple is abandoned. So you obviously have to go down and kick this false god's butt, which brings the people back to you (after you Earthquake their entire city to show them who is boss. Or maybe I just do that). 

Point is that these small stories aren't melodramatic or overwrought, but they're still oddly compelling. You really get to feeling for your little cities and you want to help the people expand. Or you're a douche and lightning their houses; hey, you decided what kind of god you are.

And the Lord said unto them, "Addith some sick drops," and thus Dubstep was born. 

The platforming segments range from easy to absolutely unfairly difficult. Each city has two stages as mentioned above, one that cleans the city and prepares it for habitation, and one at the end of the "plot arc" where you have to free the city of evil once and for all. As you expand your cities, the villagers give you gifts that improve you (such as magic or more MP to use magic in the platforming segments), and the higher your overall population, the more experience you as god/master/whatever get and your health increases. So you want your cities to be as awesome as possible before you go killin'.

The problem here is the platforming is a bit clunky at first, and takes some getting used to. Your jumping feels a bit like gravity likes you too much, and your sword-swings have a rather long recovery time after stabbing (unless you are duck stabbing) and stabbing in the air can be tricky to time. They also designed a bunch of jumps that can only be made if you are exactly on the edge, which is frustrating when the game is throwing a trillion projectiles at you.

The bosses are also hard...for a while. Eventually, in like the third city, you get the Shooting Star magic. This magic is absurdly overpowered and murders most bosses in just a few casts, littering the screen with damage. It kind of breaks the game, to be honest, though it doesn't make the stages before the bosses any easier.

A nice touch, though, is that if you lose all your lives and fail it isn't a game over, you just get punched back to the Sky Palace with your health and magic restored to try again. In fact, I don't think there is a Game Over screen in this entire game. Which makes sense, as you are God. Not like you're gonna die or anything (unless you're in Xenogears I guess).

"What if two swallows carried it together?"

The graphics are outstanding, especially for an early SNES game. Enemies are rarely pallet swapped, most stages having a unique blend of mythological creatures for you to bash up. Bosses are especially gorgeous, as are the vibrant backgrounds that really use the power of the SNES to do some awesome things. Panning down to your city shows some Mode-7 goodness, and the whole game has an artistic theme to it that I really enjoy.

But on top of that is the amazing music. The game starts with a punch to the face with the best song in the game (Fillmore's stage), but the music when you are helping your cities expand and in other stages is great too. Some of the sound effects are a bit weak (your guy's "HWAA!" sound and "UUH!" sound is weird, and is recycled in Enix's Soul Blazer game), but it doesn't detract. I also like that EVERYTHING EXPLODES WHEN YOU KILL IT. AS IT SHOULD BE. 

My only gripe with Actraiser is it's a bit short and all the elements, while amazing that they work together, could have been fleshed out more to make it an even better game. This is the kind of game you play and think, "That was amazing, but holy cow...the sequel's gonna rock my socks off!"

Unfortunately, Actraiser 2 ditched the whole city-sim portion (aka the glue that held this game together) for a straight platformer, and a really hard one at that, which is unfortunate. As such, Actraiser hasn't seen any future installments, which is a damned shame. Hey, Enix! I have an idea! Actraiser reboot on next-gen systems! Make the action levels like Dark/Demon's Souls and expand the city-building to be more robust! Oh my gosh, that would be the greatest thing ever!

Regardless, as a "launch window" game, Actraiser really blew it away. It's a bit short (if you are good at platforming and get Shooting Star you can beat the game in something like 3-5 hours) and it's elements come off as a tad clunky, but that doesn't matter. It's an exceptionally cool idea and executed well enough to be fun (and super addicting; I had a hard time quitting to write this review) and is a must for people who like games that hybridize genres. Or like games in general. Just play it, already.

The game I believe is out on the Wii's Virtual Console for like $10, but carts are pretty cheap too (usually around $20-25). This is an essential SNES game. Go get it, play it, love it. And skip the sequel.

Four out of five stars. 

Bubbles. God's chosen mode of transportation since 10,000,000,000,000 BC

Open Source Never Dies

The beauty of open source is that projects never officially die as long as the source is available.

Some classics simply keep moving forward because of this.  They get written off, domains expire, progress seems non-existent, but then somebody with a bit of knowledge and drive does something and the project is alive again!  That is the beauty of Free / Libre & Open Source Software.

Super Tux

The last Super Tux release was 0.3.3 in March 2010; that isn't even labelled stable.  The last stable release was, y'know I couldn't even find out.  It was before 2007, that's all I know.

Progress is slowly made though behind the scenes - something more obvious since the project recently acquired a forum with FreeGameDev.  There are several 'clones' (a GIT term) that have been worked on in the last year or so, with the master branch receiving plenty of love this year.

One of their problems is that some things are hard to find out without quizzing the developer(s).  For example, the editor for the development version is a separate project (as explained here), but that doesn't appear to be documented for the time being.

Status: Release required, Web News or Blog required

Extreme Tux Racer

Now here's a blast from the past.  Extreme Tux Racer, long ago losing its domain/forums, has come back to life seemingly from the brink.  With the forums moved to Sourceforge, there's been a stream of development activity.

(I even helped by managing to acquire admin access to the project in order to give it to the new developers.)

And it isn't just background noise; version 0.6 beta1 has been released!

Still, without a website or much PR beyond the forum they could do with a few fresh faces.  Forums can be quite closed communities - if you don't check it, you wouldn't know of this release.  I bet they would appreciate some feedback, so check it out if you can.

Status: Website required, Outreach required

Other News

• Cataclysm, zombie survival game, kickstarter campaign!!!
  (Deserves it's own blog post)
• Speed Dreams is moving away from PLIB to Open Scene Graph
• GSoC 2013 sees some graphical panache coming to Super Tux Kart
• Flightgear shows off some sumptuous weather graphics
• VDrift released a new build last month
• MegaGlest team pushed out 3.8.0beta1
• Probably a million more FLOSS game goodness I missed; comment!

Are there any other open source games that look stalled on the surface but are coming back to life?  Comment!

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.

Unvanquished summer tournament

Given the often quite small online communities around FOSS games, one has to become creative on how to keep players and attract new ones. Regular tournaments are one of those good ideas, albeit one that is a lot of work organizing.
One of the games that is still struggling to attract a stable player base is Unvanquished, even though the game is based on Tremulous and thus quite well developed game-play wise.

Don't hide from the Aliens

However for those complaining about it being the "same old" just with fancy graphics, they have implemented an all new resource and base building system, which will be also used in the tournament! To quote them:

Your tactics may need to change to compensate for this, but you can always test out the new gameplay on our development server beforehand, as well as by attending and observing our weekly development games on Saturdays. An explanation of the differences between our gameplay and the classic Tremulous variety will be explained in a helpful guide that we will provide to you shortly. Most notably, camping is no longer a desirable tactic, and map control is the new focus.

They said "no more camping" !"§$%&/!!!

So where can you learn more about this tournament? Well follow the previous link ;) The event will begin in the middle of July, with the first matches held on the weekend of Friday, July 19th through Sunday, July 21st.But if you manage to pass those rounds, you will have to plan for some matches on the following weekend too.
Registration starts on the 1st of July and you will need at least 3 other people on your team. I would naturally suggest a FreeGamer team, however due to my current bad internet connection, it is sadly not possible for me to join. But I hope some of the matches will be recored so that we can cover them here on the blog too :)

DevCorner: Underapprechiated game engines

In my never ending search for a FOSS game engine that is usable for game modding with out having to reinvent the wheel (nor requiring to be a C++ code master) & having decent tools for content creation (because I am spoiled and think that is a minimum requirement for a game engine) I have become quite disillusioned lately. That is because *spoiler alert* sadly there is none so far... but a few are close luckily.

The usual contenders for 3D action games are your mixed assortment of idTech based engines, most notably ioQuake3. There are a few upcoming contenders like Unvanquished's Daemon engine (which is a mix of ET:Wolf, ioQuake3 and Xreal) and a yet to emerge idTech4 based champion (my uninformed guess is that it will be dhewm3). But all of them lack a decent game-play scripting function.
On the other side of the idTech spectrum, there is the idTech1 based granddaddy DarkPlaces, which while having advanced to an quite impressive feature set, suffers a quite a bit from its nut-bolted & mostly undocumented client side add-on on the already a bit arcane script language QuakeC.

Interestingly the idTech2 based engines get little attention though. I have highlighted a few nice game projects based in it in the past, but it is probably due to the fact that each project is hacking on their own engine fork, that none has gained prominence as a game engine on it's own. But feature wise the engines behind AlienArena, Overdose and Warsow are probably the most advanced.
The last one of these, has been probably the most overlooked, with the game itself not exactly open-source friendly and the engine being developed more or less behind closed doors. It seems however that this has changed now, although given recent project news it is unclear what made them change their approach. But an all new version of it is now on Github with the main developer mentioning a few really nice changes here. Let's hope it isn't just a "source-drop" of a dying project, as after digging into it a bit (the documentation is really fragmented and lacking) I have to say that it includes a few really awesome features not commonly seen in other FOSS engines:
Besides being really performant, it is fully scriptable and has some quite unique multiplayer features like awards, friendlists and persistent game statistics. It also seems to make good process in having easy to edit GLSL shaders, which I have realized is a much rarer feature than I originally thought. Last but not least it has a really modern looking and fully scriptable menu and HUD.

Ah and before I move on to non-idTech based engines I should mention Engoo for those looking for a modernized software rendering engine based on idTech1 (there was some controversy over it, so I am trying to show some support for its further development here).

Ok, that covered, what are some maybe under appreciated non-idTech 3D engines?
First of all I should probably mention the well known ones for the sake of completeness: Cube2, Ogre3D and the new big player Torque3D. All of which are IMHO still failing to provide a good platform for easy game creation (mainly due, following the same order: in-fexibility & lack of scripting; huge mess of independent parts & bad toolchain; lack of Linux port & buggy and overly complicated toolchain).

One of the shining but lesser known examples of trying to improve the status quo is the jMoneky3 engine. Even though it is still a bit bare-bone (e.g. lacking game frameworks) the nicely integrated SDK and the great new node based GLSL shader editor keeps on attracting my attention. Similary the BlenderGameEngine sure has a few great advantages due to its tight integration. Sadly it seems to be the unliked stepchild of the Blender3D project though, which some quite serious limitations and awesome additions like the candy branch never reaching the the main release.

Then there are the still very much alive big names of the past: Irrlicht and Crystal Space. I am not exactly sure why those never quite reached the required mass to become the engines of choice, but I guess the license mess around Irrklang (and other non free but more or less required addons) and the CS Yo Frankie disaster might have to do with it. But at least Crystal Space was accepted as a hosting organization for this year's GSoC again, so they must be doing something right.

Last but not least, I would like to give a mention to a relatively new contender: Octaforge, which has supplied a steady stream of updated betas lately. The interesting things about Octaforge is that it takes all the good things from Cube2 and combines it with a much updated renderer (Tesseract) and full lua script support. But sadly it isn't quite there yet, and the move to a scripting language required the removal of all the nice game-code that it inherited from Cube2.

As closing remarks I have to admit that this article was rather lopsided towards FPS game engines (and more general purpose ones). Of course there are many great other game engines in the FOSS sphere that focus on RTS or (MMO)RPG games etc. I do however feel that many of the grievances voiced here probably apply there too, but maybe it isn't quite as frustrating there as in the FPS genre.
But if you have some better insights into those type of engines feel free to comment below!

tl;dr: the author (as an old school modder) is frustrated that after all these years there still isn't an FOSS FPS engine that can be modded as comfortably as the Half-Life2 engine or UDK. Don't miss the new qfusion stuff though.

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