3 Super Monkey Ball Alternatives - Open Sphere Rolling Games

Marbles have fascinated the population of the blue marble for centuries. Today, we take a look at three digital variants that are open source and playable cross-platform.

Veraball

The newest addition to the group of open source ball-rolling games is minimal and was made using the Godot engine.

Rock and jazz music accompanies your through the only two levels so far. None of them are super hard, making Veraball the most beginner-friendly game of the bunch.

Veraball gameplay

Windows (both portable and installer) and Linux releases are available but since Godot Engine runs on Mac OS X, you can play it on that platform as well using the source.

irrlamb

A magical engine powers the blue sphere from the inside, allowing it to roll and jump without reasonable explanation. Its goal is to touch other glass balls filled with yellow light by balancing towards them.

You steer the blue sphere. But to what end? Deliver the coup de grâce to failed experiments? Free trapped spirits? Harvest sleeping souls to grow in power? Is it a grim prognosis about the effects of future commercialized space travel and interplanetary colonization?

Welcome to irrlamb. The atmosphere is mostly dark and dungeon-like, sometimes abstract, always at least a bit magical. The two skater parks feel clinically sanitized (no graffiti).

irrlamb 0.2.1 gameplay

There are around 20 levels starting from beginner-friendly to absolutely insane.

There have been two releases this year (0.2 and 0.2.1). Most of the changes were usability improvements and bugfixes, although some levels have been added as well.

irrlamb 0.2.1 is available for Linux and Windows. Windows users have to manually install OpenAL.

For creating own levels, there is an export script available for Blender.

Neverball

Neverball has been around for a while. There are easy levels, there are hard levels, there are levels that were apparently made to challenge the game's developers.

Many levels take place in space, on grass squares floating under the sky, above the sea or above a city at night. Of our three games, this one is least suitable for those with acrophobia.

Neverball 1.6 Gameplay

There is a lot of content (326 maps minus Neverputt levels) and only a small part of it is accessibly due to my lack of balancing skills. So I present to you the most and least favorite aspects of Neverball, as seen by a player with newbie skills:

Best: 1. The oh so many levels! 2. Different ball models available, some have character (by containing characters), making it easier to have some kind of emotional connection to the game. No animated cute animals though unfortunately.

Worst: 1. The old looking non-baked textures of the basic levels 2. The camera (does not allow you to zoom, moves in disturbing ways) and consequently the controls.

Conclusion

"If only projects X, Y and Z could join forces instead of trying to re-invent the wheel!" - what an annoying thing to say, don't you think? I hope you got the chance to play irrlamb, Neverball and Veraball - and if not I hope this review brought you closer to them - so that you can appreciate the different feels to the gameplay and scenery.

All I really want now are video tutorials for creating new levels...

Are there any open source games with similar mechanics that I missed? Are there proprietary games that developers should consider taking inspiration from other than Super Monkey Ball? Please let us know in the comments!

Stunt Rally 2.6 and Irrlamb 0.2

Stunt Rally 2.6 has been released, with new features including pacenotes (i.e. corner speed/severity hints) and a rewritten sound system with reverberation (changelog).

Stunt Rally is a sandbox racing game with a huge number of tracks (172 in 2.6) and lots of cars. It was originally forked from VDrift and features Ogre3D as a graphics engine instead of the custom (and less sophisticated) graphics engine in VDrift.

A video is worth a thousand pictures and a picture a thousand words so, instead of me writing a million of those, I invite you to check out the gameplay in the video that accompanied the release:

Also recently updated is Irrlamb. Those with incredibly good memories will recall this physics-based game originally appearing many years ago. I originally wrote about Irrlamb over 8 years ago on Free Gamer, and the previous release (0.1.1) is over 5 years old if I'm not mistaken (it is hard to check since things have moved on since then i.e. Google Code where its development was originally hosted).

This release adds new graphical capabilities, new levels, gamepad support and various fixes - see the announcement for more details.

I'll also write a really lengthy... wait a minute! Let's link a video instead. ;)

Contributors, contributors, contributors

The development structure of FOSS game projects can be a one-man show, it can be semi-closed by having a fixed team and little web presence, it can have lots of tasks without anybody knowing what needs to be done, or it can be plain frozen until a developer decides to pick it up.

Today, I will try to pick some of the open development ones that provide some kind of ordered task list and provide instructions in the case of media creation being the job.

Programming

Rocket Race in Syntensity [more]

Syntensity has some open tasks (having played the game helps understanding :) ), which involve tinkering with the Sauerbraten-based engine and JavaScript.

latest UFO:AI world view

I just found out on #ufoait that UFO:AI is soon to release the first version that allows you to win the game. This will make the squad tactics game be eligible to a line on our list of complete foss games! There are still a few tasks to complete before 2.3, a humble list compared to all the open issues.

PARPG developers wants to ship the first tech demo on 10th of March but could use some Python programmers' help. The engine used by PARPG, FIFE, just released 0.3.0, introducing internationalization as one of the features. One plan for a forthcoming version is to improve rendering performance.

Never mind the sidetracking, regarding PARPG programming: here's the first step (chat) of involvement and the second (forums). :) In case you're worried about setup complications: being on Arch Linux it has been no effort for me to install fife-svn and test the svn version of PARPG many times.

Current PARPG status

I told you about the problems of getting Bitfighter to run on my x64 system. Others suffer from the same and now the development team is looking for someone willing to take a look at our errors and their code in this thread. Should you happen to take a look and have an idea of what the problem is but are too laz.. busy to register at yet another forum, please do comment on this post. :)

Assets/Media/Art

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

Racer r242 screenshots

Racer is getting prettier and prettier and hopefully the instructions for making cars, using the editor and creating visual themes will let some race track artists do their magic. I recommend the racer-dev group for getting in touch with the developer.

A list of wanted voice lines for NAEV was compiled. For brainstorming, a PiratePad was used, which is based on the FOSS collaborative web text editor etherpad.

jClassicRPG recently received a new voice pack but is still looking for more voices. If you are or you know someone who likes to put their voice to use and has a way to record it, go to/direct them to the updated voice acting instructions.

irrlamb documentation now features a wiki page on level editing. For questions and feedback use this thread.

Speed Dreams, Racer, irrlamb, Violetland

Speed Dreams (SD, formerly known as TORCS-NG) is a fork of TORCS with the aim to

implement exciting new features, cars, tracks and AI opponents to make a more enjoyable game for the player, as well as constantly improving visual and physics realism.

Now I'm not a racing game fan and so the biggest change I noticed between SD and TORCS is the menu look in which the fork really shines. See my comparison over here.

Anyways, I recorded a video. Please excuse my driving un-skills :)

Racer has been making some progress. You can now play player-vs-player (there is no way of 'winning' though) and the levels have been improved as far as I can tell. If you have some ideas to share for this sci-fi racing game in the works, please do comment on their group!

After quite a while, another version of irrlamb has been released! It takes away the old (in my opinion very original) levels and instead presents polished graphics, a friendly tutorial and two skateboard arenas.

I tried the um.. "top-down zombie shooter with rpg elements, I guess" violetland and was impressed by how much fun I had! Its simple gameplay is well-supported by the cool music. I have been playing a match of this fun action-rpg now and then.