New Alien Arena, with included alpha-demo of in development commercial spin-off

Yes, it looks like the developers behind the long running idTech2 based AlienArena are going make a more slower paced & 'tactical' spin-off and try to sell it. As before the engine will stay open-source (GPLv2), but the assets for the spin-off will stop being free-as-in-beer.

Here is the official launch-trailer of the new update and the alpha demo:


Beside the new game-play mode, they have also finally updated the menu, and the new version of it is rather spiffy. You can see it in action and more of the regular game-play in this recently uploaded random YouTube vid (warning: goofy British accents and profanity). GamingOnLinux also recently had a small preview-article.

Last but not least (while we are on the topic of idTech2 based games), a small game-developer's advertisement of a new project currently unfolding in our forums. If you know your way around Quake(2) based engines and/or pixelish art, please join the effort ;)

Flock 2013, OLCP Games, Gamification through Badges on Linux

There were some game development related events at Flock Fedora Contributor Conference, August 2013 in lovely Charleston, SC, US.

Trigger Rally Map Workshop 

So far my contributions to Fedora were merely a few wiki edits but my conference proposals were well-received.

Free Art Game Making presentation slide

I ended up speaking about making games using free art and leading a Trigger Rally level building workshop (video).

Fedora badges

At the conference, I learned about Fedora's badge program and that it is connected to Mozilla Open Badges.

Lemonade Stand (OLPC) Sugar "activity"

Another discovery: Lemonade Stand, which is an educational game developed by people from FOSS@RIT, who work on bringing Mozilla Open Badges to the OLPC.

Game development appears to be getting more and more of a foot in the door at free software conferences, so I encourage people working on open games to apply as speakers at conferences, talking about technical and social aspects of free, open source game development project leadership and contribution. (Not just at FOSS events, why not at general game dev events as well?)

If you have any relevant talks from recent events to point out, please do so in the comments!

Alpha 14 and a crowd-funding campaign for 0 A.D.

Pretty interesting news from 0 A.D. today: They are having a Indigogo crowd-funding campaign.



Note that this is a flexible funding campaign, so even if they don't reach their goals all money donated will go to the project.

They also released a new Alpha version, codenamed Naukratis. Change-log would be too long to list here (which I consider a good thing ;) ), but here is a picture of some high-quality newly added building models:

New blacksmith buildings

So check out the new version and please consider donating to this top of the crop FOSS game project.

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?

Plants vs Zombies 2: It's About Time

The Short

Pros
- The free sequel to the smash hit Plants vs Zombies
- Did I mention it's free? That's a pretty big plus
- Despite having microtransactions, the entire game can be beaten and is still fun without spending a cent
- New plants, levels, and time periods are great
- Tons of new challenges for each level, not to mention unlockable minigames and rewards
- Plant food was an excellent idea to give you something to do in the downtime
- Graphics seem marginally improved and look great on iPad
- Cone-head zombies in Egypt have little pharaoh hats. But still cones. That's pretty great.

Cons
- Currently exclusive to iOS
- Some plants can only be gotten through purchasing, and they're quite overpriced
- Missing an actual ending to the "story," which I assume will be unlocked later
- Challenges become repetitive quite quickly
- Hunting for randomly dropped keys is a chore
- Where's the zen garden?
- Doesn't quite have the same magic as the first game

Burn them all.

The Long

I, like the rest of the world, eagerly awaited a sequel to Popcap's 2009 PC hit, Plants vs Zombies. I played the game on almost every platform imaginable, unlocking everything in the iOS version and beating every mini-game on the PC version with gusto. It was a simple game that held a level of complexity to it that made it both engaging and easy to pick up. In short, it was a perfect casual game.

Four freaking years later and we finally have it: Plants vs Zombies 2: It's About Time. Exclusive (for the time being) to iOS devices and sporting a free-to-play model that is very indicative of the recent acquirement of Popcap by EA (seriously guys: everything doesn't need microtransactions), the outlook for this game was surprisingly grim. Did it ruin the magic of PvZ with it's touch-pad exclusivity and money-grubbing unlockables? Or will your plants still be soiled with delight at the prospect of murdering zombies?

Eh, a bit of both I guess.

Crazy Dave: Zombie Expert.

There's sort of a plot to this one. Sort of. Crazy Dave finally eats the magic taco you gave him back in PvZ, and he likes it so much he wants to travel back in time in his talking, time-travelling motor home to eat it again. Of course, it all goes wrong and you're slammed back into various time periods, specifically ancient egypt, a pirate "era," and the wild west. It seems zombies were around then, too, and in spades (this is seriously the worst world to live in), so plant your zombies on the tile floors and get killin'!

The dialogue is mildly amusing, but after a while it gets obnoxious. The charm of Crazy Dave was that he didn't show up after every single level in the first game, but now he seems to be the star character. While his insanity is endearing to a point, it also becomes grating how unbelievably stupid he is, not to mention his car sounds like the guide from Nintendoland and is just as static in her personality. 

The map is very "Mario World"esque. 

Another major change is the story mode, or rather, how it's presented. Ditching the linear level progression from the first game, it instead ops for a more similar approach to how it was done in it's Facebook game, Plants vs Zombies: Adventures. You progress down a fairly straight path, Mario World style, until you reach the Stargate (tm) at the end of each level. Along the way there's various doors that can be unlocked with keys. Behind these unlocks are new plants, powerups (such as getting a refund when digging up a plant) and the minigame portion of the game. All gated doors are some sort of minigame, and all require keys specific to that world to unlock.

How do you get keys? Well, two ways. Either they randomly drop (and the drop rate isn't awful, to be fair, though you'll have to burn through a few rounds of that world's Endless Mode to farm them up), or you can  just pay to open the gate. So on a scale of one to super offensive in the microtransactions-frustration-o-meter, the doors aren't that bad. 

Though having six keys left over in Egypt while I still need six more in Wild West is a bit annoying.

Key get!

The gameplay itself is identical to the original game, down to the grid layout. Egypt gives you a full plot, with later levels popping up destroyable gravestones to slow you down a bit. The pirate level mixes it up with a gangplank over water on the right side, with pirates swinging in on ropes for the shorter lanes. Wild west has probably the best new addition: minecarts. You can plant only a single plant per track, but you can move it freely and at any time up and down. It's a neat trick and makes me wish each level before it had possessed as clever an idea. 

There's two other new things with regard to actual gameplay that should be mentioned: plant food and powerups. See, coins actually don't buy anything anymore, at least not in terms of unlocks. All the money you get is used for in-level powerups. The first is plant food. Green-colored zombies will randomly drop plant food, or you can pay some of your coins to get one immediately. What they do varies depending on the plant you put it on. Sunflowers drop a jackpot of suns. Pea-shooters blast out a plethora of peas. Iceberg lettuce freezes all zombies on the screen, and so on. This is actually the best new feature because it adds a level of interactivity during matches that the previous games didn't have. It also allows the levels to be much harder, forcing you to ration your plant food and use it wisely. Then again, you can always "cheat" and buy more on the fly if you suck, but I beat the entire game without ever having to buy any more.

Fire at will!

The other addition is payable powerups. These are also used during matches, and can only be obtained by spending coin. You have three: a "pinch" move that kills all the zombies you pinch, a "flick" move that launches them back (or off screen), and a "hold" move that electrocutes them. They all have a limited timer and (in some levels) can only be bought a set number of times. Again, these cost coins.

And, as you have already guessed, you can pay real money for coins. However, if you have any ability at Plants vs Zombies, you won't need any of these powerups until attempting to tackle some of the harder minigames in the later levels, meaning you'll have a massive pileup of cash to blow anyway. Again, I beat every level and got every star and never spent a cent, while using powerups liberally at the end. So, still ok on the microtransaction front. 

My only downside to all of this is that, if you do use the powerups liberally, it kind of completely kills the challenge. This is one of those "you can just pay to win the whole game" problems we see, but since this is a single player game and not an MMO, the only person's fun you are cheating is your own. Trust me: don't buy coins. You don't need them. 

THIS is the stuff I don't like. 

I think I'd better finish off the microtransactions talk by talking about the part I don't like: the store. Now, let me say this: you get tons of plants as part of the game, and even more by unlocking doors. This includes a variety of new plants. While the count isn't quite as high as PvZ, they do seem to have streamlined their purposes down a bit better (there are no "upgrades" anymore; double headed suns are just their own plant, for instance) and the arsenal they give you is more than well enough equipped to destroy just about anything in your path.

The annoying part is there is no way, either through in-game currency or unlocks, to get to some of the bonus plants and powerups. The powerups/plants featured above can only be gotten with real money. You could have fifty billion coins and you still couldn't buy the squash; not an option. I wouldn't be bitter, but they gated the Ice Pea behind this dollar cost, and he was one of my staples in the first game. Jerks.

The other annoying part is these powerups are way too expensive. Nine bucks for the chili and a sun powerup? Seriously? And with no options to just drop like $15 and get all the upgrades, you do have to buy them all separate for an inflated price. At that point I'd rather just pay $6 for the app and get everything. But what do I know about business? I'm not EA, the most loved of all video game companies. 

Snow Pea, I love you, but not $4 worth. 

All that aside, considering the absolutely absurd amount of content you get for free with this game, I really shouldn't be complaining. Once I looked in the shop once I never went back, and I was happier for it. Buying stuff just wasn't an option for me. While the gameplay was a little too similar to the first game to keep me really engaged, I still got sucked in. And while having to hunt for Stars (which meant replaying earlier levels with special, "hard" objectives) was fun at first, the objectives get competitive and you have to do the same ones for every time period, and I felt they were really trying to tack on some time to this bad boy.

At least the game looks good. I was kind of a hater of the new art style at first, but after playing it a bit I don't mind. It's more "hand drawn" than before, and the plants have considerably more frames of animation, which is nice. The new mixup of zombies is the real highlight, though, with each period sporting a new batch of obnoxious zombies  for you to kill. I just really wish there was a "Time Vortex" level where I could have Camel Zombies along with the Pirate Zombies and the Wild West Chicken zombies. Maybe in DLC.

The Texas flag with a brain on it is a nice touch.

All in all, Plants vs Zombies 2: It's About Time is a great game that's store leaves a bit of a sour taste in your mouth. However, if you can look past the microtransactions and repetitive star-hunt that ends each world, there's a lot to love here. It's almost everything one could ask for: more zombies, more plants, more levels, more tricks, and more ways to play. Honestly, if it weren't for the iOS exclusivity and the overpriced DLC, I'd say this game very nearly surpassed it's predecessor. 

However, there is still something missing. The magic of the first game, which might be no fault of this game itself, but that PvZ felt so novel. In either case, it's good to finally have a sequel to one of my favorite tower defense games, and if you happen to own an iOS device it's a must download. Because...seriously. It's free. 

(Now port it to Android and PC already!)

Four out of five stars. 

Needs more boomerangers. 

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

The Short

Pros
- A fun hybrid of shop management and action RPG questing
- The translation is surprisingly entertaining and appropriately silly
- Taking heroes on quests only to sell the best stuff they find back to them at 300% markup is pretty great
- A surprisingly long RPG quest campaign with multiple adventurers, dungeons, and secrets to find
- I sold month-old egg on toast for a thousand bucks. Take that, economy!

Cons
- Selling items becomes a bit formulaic; most new shop-related stuff (custom orders, etc.) show up early and don't introduce anything new later on
- Dungeons can be a grind for XP and items, and the limited bag space (which is upgradable) is a chore
- Music is fun at first, intolerable in large quantities
- Recette's Japanese exclamations when she does anything are incredibly obnoxious
- I pressed "Esc --> Skip Scene" more in this game than maybe any to date
- Made me feel like the Wal-Mart of the fantasy world when I would only sell severely marked up junk to housewives just before the market crashed and everybody was poor
- I hate little girls

Capitalism, ho, indeed.

The Long

Let me play a scenario out for you. Let's say you go to a store with intent to buy something, like a hat. You've gone to this store lots of times, and seen the hat in the window, so you know the exact price or at least an estimate of the price. So when you prepare to leave, you bring the amount of money you'd expect to buy the item with, right? No? You'd just bring like fifty cents and then complain when they didn't mark down a five-hundred dollar item down to match your level?

Congratulations, you are now the little girl from Recettear. I should put a sign on the door that says "No little girls, ever." We sell weapons in here, for crying out loud! One little girl wanted to roll out with a freaking Crystal Sword +6! I'm gonna get fined out the ass if that happens!

And that, in a nutshell, is Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale on PC. Little girls showing up, demanding low prices, and whining. Same with old grandpas. Recettear: Screw the young and the elderly.

I wish you were dead. 

Recette has a problem. Her dad just up and decided one day to become an adventurer, and since this is a JRPG Recette only has one parent. Next thing she knows he's just left her at home with his massive amount of debt, and then got killed by a dragon or something. I dunno, I couldn't be bothered to read all the text.

Anyway, Tear, some jerk-bag fairy, is with the collections agency and needs this absurd quantity of money paid off. Why she didn't bother to come earlier rather than like two months before the deadline is beyond me, but I guess it make the game more stressful that way. So you have to meet weekly increments to pay off this outstanding loan your jerk dad accrued, while having a shizzy job, getting trash talked by the elderly, other store owners, and basically everybody in town, and just trying to sell the damn toast back so you can make a minimal profit on it.

Basically, Recette is a generational trying to pay off the debt they accrued by going to college because their parents told them it would be ok, and now gets blamed for being lazy and useless because she sits around the house all day selling candy instead of "getting a real job." So, in all honesty, it's a parable for our times. 

Where was I going with this? I dunno. I sit at home playing video games because I want to, dang it! Now leave me alone, mom! When my YouTube channel gets big, you'll see who is laughing then!

I even marked it down to 50% what I paid for it, and the little twit couldn't afford it. BOOKS BE PRICEY, YO. GET A KINDLE.

Recettear is a fusion between two genres. In that sense, it kind of reminds me of Persona 3 and 4. The first portion of the game is in the title: selling stuff. It's pretty easy to make money in the game, as every store in town sells stuff for under it's base value, and you can usually get at least at 10-30% markup on that junk by just turning around and selling it. It's like that jerk at the flea markets who goes and buys all the good stuff from the other vendors really early, then slaps labels on them and makes a mint throughout the day. You are that person. Or rather, Recette is. She's a soulless creature driven only by capitalistic urges. 

But the real bucks come in market fluctuations. Remember that Sword of Pure Pwnage +239 that you bought for a fat price yesterday? Well too bad, idiot, because the market here bounces more than an ADHD kid in a bounce house, and now it's worth nothing. But don't worry, all those almond breads you've been hording are now worth triple value! Slap them on the shelves and giggle with glee as starving mothers have to pay absurd amounts of money for a candied apple!

The market fluctuations are pretty much guesswork, but a simple strategy also works well: buy low, sell high. Or buy medium, sell high. Just always sell high. If stuff isn't high, then go do something else, or just be sure to stock up on massive amounts of inventory. Or just stock your store with only books and see who shows up. You'll be out of business faster than you can say "Borders Books." 

SOMEONE PLEASE BUY THESE FREAKING WANDS.

The other half of the game is the adventuring. See, you're in a JRPG world, which means dungeon crawling for items with a limited bag to carry them in. There's a wide assortment of heroes you have to unlock via traditional or untraditional means. You have your generic swordsman guy, a thief girl, an elf archer girl, a punching monk, some airheaded spear lancer chick, a demon mage, an obnoxious whiny boy child, and a robot. Pretty much all they needed was a dog and they'd have covered all the JRPG basics. Maybe in future DLC.

Questing is simple and is done in the Secret of Mana style of action RPGing. You run around and stab/shoot/kill stuff on each floor, picking up precious XP and loot before going to the next one. Every five floors is a boss, and after you kill it you can either bail on the dungeon or keep going deeper. If you die, however, you can only take one item back rather than your full bag, so be careful! Luckily you can bring all that super-expensive junk you bought for your store that is now worth nothing because of the market crash, and the heroes can borrow them so they don't suck. Don't worry, you get it back after, and can sell it to them directly at massively inflated prices to save you time. Friends exist to be abused, people!

I'll take a hundred. 

The other Persona similarity is the time management. You have four blocks of time in a day. During these you can either open shop, go scour the town for hot deals, or go adventuring. You only have a week to meet Tear's rapidly increasing demands, so being certain you don't screw around during your day is essential.

I will say this: there is something exhilarating about making absurd amounts of money. I discovered pretty quickly that I'm da bomb at this game. Most of the time when debt collection came around I had more than double what was asked, the later ones having me have not just enough for that debt, but the debt after as well. I guess I was really good at taking advantage of the sudden metal shortage, selling that junk sword I bought when swords were more common than toothpicks like it was freaking Excalibur. 

The main issue I have with Recettear is no one point is particularly...well, fun. Is it engaging? Absolutely. Addicting? No doubt. But like grinding around in the dungeons in Persona, nothing was every quite good enough for me to be in love with it. When I was adventuring I wished I was back at the shop. When I was selling stuff at massively engorged prices...well, I was having a good time, but at the back of my mind I kept thinking about my inventory and when I'd need to go adventuring again. Not to mention if you miss custom orders because the bozos didn't bother to show up during the one block of time you were open, they'll come chew you out as if it is your fault and they couldn't just pick up the damn thing now since it's just the next day and if you really wanted your freaking three foodstuffs you would have showed up in the morning when we were open.

Pictured: A huge mooch.

At least there's lots of dungeons to keep you sated, even if their mileage may vary depending on how much you like repetition. Expect enemy pallet swaps a-plenty, with bees and bouncing mushrooms being the worst enemies to try and hit ever. Mixing up heroes keeps things a bit fresh, but since they start low leveled it's much easier to just commit to one person (read: the fast thief girl) and just take her the whole way. They're randomized, which is also a good thing, but tedium can set in once you get in a groove. Still, it's just as good as any other game where the whole game is dedicated to the crawling, and Recettear comes with a bonus Wal-Mart simulator, so I suppose I can't fault it too heavily. 

Point being: it's fun, yes, but also a bit of a grind. Like many Japanese games, they're addictive by nature, but rely heavily on your tolerance for repetition in order for them to be fun. You could argue it's an analogy for the repetitive nature of Capitalism, where we just keep working and working, making more and more money to make more and  more money, all in some fruitless attempt to meet some society-created goal that will never, ever tell us when we are finished, leaving us an an endless loop of dissatisfaction until we're all dead.

Recetetear has that too. It's called "Endless Mode."

It's just not the same without Recette screaming "AYEEE?!" because she swapped out a bread roll with a beef bowl on her display.

Graphically the game is dated, but you probably won't notice it. Honestly, this would be a great PSP (or now Vita or 3DS game), because it's low-graphics and perfectly suited for quick bursts of play. As a PC game it's a bit grainy, the sprites repeating and generally looking a little old (but it's an old game, so that's ok). The enemies have a massive graphical inconstancy, with hand-drawn pixel sprites alongside awful polygonally rendered knight creatures. It's like they just looted a bunch of other games and tossed them all in for their enemies. Alright.

The music is whimsical and generally unoffensive, but it will drive you insane due to the repetition. I found myself putting on some sort of metal soundtrack when I went through the dungeons (Nightwish works pretty good) and some Bob Marley when I was opening up the shop. 

Oh yeah, there's voice clips, and they're all in Japanese. Again: cute at first, annoying after repetition. 

Welcome to Applestop, would you like to pre-order a Granny Smith?

I might have sounded a bit harsh on Recettear, so let me end by saying this: it's a cute little game with a funny premise and great, addicting gameplay. Those looking for more depth in their RPGs (or shop keeping games) might want to look elsewhere, but if you're a fan of JRPGs, the Persona series, or Wal-Mart's power scooters, Recettear is a game for you. The story is silly (and text heavy...), the game whimsical, and loaded with enough to do to last you several dozen hours at least. Considering this game's usually on sale for like $5 on Steam, you could do a lot worse. Like, a lot worse. Have you seen the indie games on there? Get this instead. 

Now port it to a portable device, where it belongs. Capitalism, ho!

Three out of five stars. 

So...is his porn collection in the soup, or...?

WebGL dungeon crawler Moonshades now FOSS

More browser-based RPG goods for you today: the developer behind the game Moonshades recently indicated on the Opengameart.org forums that this neat old-school (ok not as old-school as Heroine Dusk) dungeon crawler is now fully open-source.

Have a look at the alpha game-play:


It seems the entire game (including the source-code) is released under the rather art focused Creative Commons Attribution (cc-by 3.0) license, but since that is pretty compatible even to the GPL, this shouldn't really matter at all.

Have fun playing!