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.

Progress on Octaforge

One of the newer engine/game projects I have been following closely is Octaforge. It is basically a fork of Tesseract, which in turn is an graphic improvement project by the makers of the well known Cube2 engine.

The main difference with Octaforge is that aims to become a game SDK and platform for easy creation of mods; And one of its prime new features for this is full scriptability with Lua.

Read about their progress on the latest beta here, which also includes this nice video showcasing the new player model and an test map:

Asylum: Free-as-in-Freedom Horror Adventure, Successfully Crowd-Funded

This is a guest post by Hythlodaeus on an interesting FLOSS game engine project, being developed by a professional games company.

ASYLUM video

I guess I should take a few paragraphs on this article to explain my stance on crowd-funded game projects. I've always been turned off by most Kickstarter game projects for a very simple reason: after personally inquiring a plethora of developers on their stance for Open-Source and Free Software, I was generally met with negative replies, half-baked excuses, bitter retorts or complete silence.

Now, although I recognize it is every developer's right to pick the license and the conditions for the usage of their own work, it strikes me as a very odd attitude for people engaging into crowd funding projects to be so unwilling to provide any other warranties to their prospective backers and future customers other than “we will make this happen if you give us enough money”. From this point, let's make something clear: pledging on a crowd-funded game project isn't exactly the same thing as buying a video game. From the backers' part it's an investment and a risk. It's about depositing your faith on other peoples' words, in hopes they will eventually deliver what they promised. When you buy a game, be it good or bad, you at least know that you're dealing with a finished product. When you pledge on a crowd-funded project, completion is only a possibility regardless of the campaign's success.

So, in my personal opinion, I've always thought crowd-funded game projects should strive to provide the level of trust they request from their backers. In this case,  that means allowing people to have access to the game's source code under a permissive / Free Software license, preferably starting right at the end of the campaign. Why? Simply because that allows for a tighter control of what's going on in the development backstage, and will allow every contributor to provide better feedback on the work being done. Raw engine code also gives backers something that can eventually be picked up and used for other personal purposes, if the project happens to fail for some reason.

With that said, let's talk a little about this project, which is, after all, what lead me to write this post. Asylum is the brainchild of Agustin Cordes, the Argentinian developer behind Scratches, a horror game that managed to get some degree of attention way back in 2006. The project aims to create a Lovecraftian-inspired horror point-and-click adventure game that will focus on an intense and immersive atmosphere, followed closely by engaging storytelling. From the trailer and screenshots provided so far, it seems like a rather professional endeavour, but for me the most pleasant surprise, was that the developer's in-house engine, Dagon, will be Free and Open-Source. On top of that, Cordes himself actually took the time to explain why he believes the engine should be free, and how such a decision aims not only to help preserve Asylum for future generations, but also to empower other indie developers by providing an open platform anyone will be free to use.

Asylum Kickstarter Video (Bonus)

Since there is no information available about specific licensing on the project page, I actually went on to ask the developer about which specific license was being used for the Dagon engine:

Me: Hello. I have one question regarding Dagon. You already stated it's going to be free and open source, but exactly under which software license are you going to release it?
Agustin Cordes: Hi! We're currently using CDDL but I'm expecting to re-license with the more popular MPL 2.0 very soon. Cheers!
Me: Fair enough. Do I have your permission to quote this conversation in a news blog about Free Software gaming?
Agustin Cordes: Absolutely! :)

“MPL” referring of course to the Mozilla Public License, which despite not being a strong copyleft license, it is both Free Software and GPL compatible. So perhaps Dagon can motivate a new generation of graphic adventure lovers to innovate upon the work started by Asylum. We can only hope future Kickstarter projects and indie developers adopt a similar perspective on Open-Source development.

With little less than a few days to go (I'm ashamed to say I only heard about this project very recently), Asylum is already fully funded, but if you still wish to contribute to this genuinely FLOSS project, or simply purchase the game for a special price, you still have a chance. Extra funding goals have already been set, and some additional rewards may also seem worthy to you.

The source for Asylum's engine, Dagon, can already be found here, currently licensed under CDDL (Thanks to Evropi for pointing this out).

Winter Shorts 2: Physica, SkyRiot, OpenMW

Physica screenshots

Let's play Physica - a hard casual platformer game played on Linux

Physica is a very simple casual platformer game where the goal is to drive a square through game levels from its starting position to his goal, avoiding hazards and without falling down.

SkyRiot screens

SkyRiot is available for free for Android on Google Play and was released under open source and free content licenses on SourceForge.net [forum post].

SkyRiot is a 2D flying shooting platform action game for Android devices. Fly a hoverboard and use an assortment of weaponry as you, an anarchist, single-handedly wage war against a totalitarian regime. Full 360-degree aiming along with total freedom of movement will keep you glued to your device for many hours as you blast your way across over 10 game maps.

OpenMW v0.21.0 Commentary

OpenMW 0.21.0 has been released. Changelog:

• Various dialogue, trading, and disposition fixes and improvements
• Torch flickering improved to better match vanilla Morrowind
• Fix for attribute fluctuation when infected with Ash Woe Blight
• Adjusted activation range to better match vanilla Morrowind
• Fixes for the Journal UI
• Fixed crash caused by Golden Saint models
• Fix for beast races being able to wear shoes
• Fix for background music not playing
• Fix for meshes without certain node names not being loaded
• Fix for incorrect terrain shape on inital cell load
• Fix for MWGui::InventoryWindow creating a duplicate player actor at the origin
• Added video playback
• Added support for escape sequences in message box and dialogue text
• Added AI related script functions, note that AI is not functional yet
• Implemented fallbacks for necessary ini values in the importer, unused in OpenMW as of yet
• Implemented execution of scripts of objects in containers/inventories in active cells
• Cell loading performance improvements
• Removed broken GMST contamination fixing mechanism

Convergent evolution?

Today we have a small biology lesson ;)
Have a look at this screenshot:

A nice warehouse

TeamFortress2, right? Well WRONG ;) It is actually a screenshot from one of the maps from the upcoming War§ow 0.55 release!


War§ow is a open-source game based on the updated Quake2 engine QFusion, and has already seen some quite successful previous releases. They focus on a fast, e-sports style game play and their general art direction is a pretty nice cell-shaded comic world.

Lately their their style has been for sure party influenced by TeamFortress2 however, which at least in my opinion is not a bad thing :) For a whole bunch of other screenshots and an update on what else you can expect from the new version, check out their newest blog post here. Overall there will be some pretty nice improvements, and probably a significant performance increase with VBO integration into the engine.


But maybe most interestingly, they will also include a new game play mode, Capture the Flag: Tactics. And guess what? It will be a class based team CTF, with turrets and ammo dispensers. Sounds familiar right? :p

Say Hello to Mr. Turret

Sadly I have to mention though that the art content of War§ow is completely unfree, and its development team shows a general lack of interest in the idea of FOSS... Yes the engine source code is available, but probably only because it is GPL and therefore has to be.
Second lesson for today, kids: GPL is good, mkay?

A3P: Acquire, Attack, Asplode, PWN!

Hey FreeGamer crowd, I hope there are still a few people around ;)
Today there will be only a short update, as I simply can't believe this gem of a game (see below) has not been featured on this page!
EDIT: Do not miss qudobup's post about FOSS engine news directly below this one!

A unique arena shooter

So someone had the balls (pun intended) and released a completely unique arena shooter with many nifty features, described by the creator as a mix of TPS/RTS/OMG/BBQ ;)
Check out A3P, if that has sparked your interest! At it's current version (0.5) it can be described as a third person arena shooter with some small RTS/squad command elements, and it is definitely fun to play:

A3P gameplay video 4

The technical specs are rather interesting too: Based on the BSD licensed Panda3D engine (while itself being licensed MIT; the media license is unclear though) it has all the bells and whistles one can expect from a modern game (Full GLSL shader based rendering, networked ODE physics, even integration into your webbrowser).
Yet it was developed by ONE man in only ONE year! That makes us fellow free game developers look a bit bad, I guess :( Maybe that's because it was developed in Python!
Check out the development blog for further insight into this miracle ;)