Just a quick note. I'm looking to fund work on OpenGameArt.org full time (probably via Kickstarter or similar) once my current work project is done, and I'm interested in hearing what people would like me to work on. If you have any thoughts, please join the discussion on OGA:
WTactics is a beautiful, freely licensed card game which pleasantly surprises for example by having it's amazing assets under free licenses, not shying away from employing same-sex love themes and now, by inviting game designers to share an apartment in lovely Sweden on WTactics development during July 2013.
People all over the world are hereby welcomed to participate in Summer of Cards 2013 – the first ever real life gathering of the dev. team and all those of you that want to get aboard and contribute to the worlds first truly pro libre customizable card game, our dear WTactics. 1:st to 28:th of July 2013 is when this is going down in Malmö, Sweden, so do some reading in here and scribble us a mail already so we can start planning for wicked goodness. You come and stay as you may.
"A couchsurfing style gamejam" was approved as a possible description of the event.
For 0 A.D., Erik Johansson steps down from project leadership and Michael D. Hafer assumes that role.
In Unknown Horizons, Nightraven steps back and Kilian fills the project management role.
Leadership in free and open source game projects is an exciting topic with much opinion about which style will lead to a successful game - whatever the subject's definition of "success" is - and too few examples to make objective statements about it.
Are you following any specific projects and their leadership structures an want to comment on these? I must admit that I am out of the loop with many, many projects, although I am pretty sure that for example Flare, NAEV and Valyria Tear have (successful) Benevolent Dictator for Life style leadership.
On related note: FIFE (the isometric 2d engine used by Unknown Horizons) moved to GitHub.
Google's Summer of Code, is an annual sponsorship of programmers to improve selected open-source programs (or games :D ). This year, quite a few interesting FOSS game projects got accepted (again) and one being our very own friends of the SuperTuxKart project.
Great news from the people behind the idTech4 powered stealth FPS The Dark Mod: They are making great steps to leave their Doom3 mod legacy behind and a standalone version should not be all that far from now.
New The Dark Mod replacement artwork
You can follow the progress here on their forums, and maybe you can also give them an helping hand.
Interestingly there are two other recently updated Doom3 mods, that could easily fit in as The Dark Mod mods, e.g. going stand alone with The Dark Mod's help.
Sadly both of them use proprietary themes (and one could even argue that The Dark Mod is borderline infringing on one too), but I am still looking forward to try out these nice community creations once they become stand-alone!
Bushido Blocks is a puzzle game for Android under GPL license, inspired by block-bashing games such as Bejeweled, Diamond Dash and Tap Blox.
Bushido Blocks Screenshots
Tap matches of three or more blocks to slice them with your katana. The more blocks you can slice in one go, the more time you gain on the clock. Special blocks eliminate whole rows of blocks but don't give you any extra time, so use them wisely.
2x0ng is a challenging action/puzzle game with procedurally generated levels. It is pronounced "TWO-zong", and is the sequel to David O'Toole's 2009 PC puzzler Xong.
2x0ng framebuffer examples
At its core, this game is a mashup. 2x0ng's design is a nonlinear combination of several different late 70s/early 80s home video games, combining related aspects of each into something new. In 2x0ng, you move a guy around the screen and shoot at enemies in all directions, as in Berzerk. The ball you throw ricochets and comes back to you, like in Tron Deadly Discs. You break colored bricks with the ball, like in Breakout. You transfer colors from one place to another in order to complete the level, similar to Revenge Of The Beefsteak Tomatoes.
To reach the next level, you must successively unlock new areas by opening color-coded gates in the correct order. The levels are procedurally generated, so the game experience is different each time. Later levels are much larger than the screen, and feature substantially more moving/colliding objects than would have been possible in a real home video game from that era.
In a pretty surprising move the source-code of the idTech3 based games Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy were released under the GPL by Activision and Raven Software. You can find the original source drops here and here. The content is obviously still propitiatory (e.g. you need to buy it), but some people have already plans to upgrade the source as OpenJK (most likely back-ports from ioQuake3) and make a Linux version most likely. Would be also cool if a nice stand-alone FOSS 3rd person sword-fighting game would come out of this... but the detailed player animations will likely be the biggest road-block.
Ahh well... and since I hate posting something with no pictures or videos I include the pretty nice new Flare 0.18 release:
It includes some pretty nice new features too:
10 Equipment Slots, up from 4 (and easily configurable)
Ok I admit it... I am a bit of a 0 A.D. fanboy! But the new Alpha 13 release is also great again, and deserved an update post:
Also pretty cool is the new OpenMW 0.22 release, that finally features player and NPC animations, and thus starts to look more like a functioning game:
