The Widelands team put out a release candidate for their next release, Widelands build10, of their Settlers II inspired game. Check it out!
Now who remembers Egoboo? Or the continuation effort that fizzled out? You know, the cutesy 3D roguelike where your characters waddled around? Well, there's a new place to go for Egoboo development. Several individual efforts have been released and now those efforts are being combined. The most notable ones are Egoboo 2.2.4 and Egoboo++. Hopefully we will see a new release in very near future. :-)
Pingus, the Lemmings clone with penguins, which seemed to have died a death at version 0.6.0 - which was a promising release as well with a nice playable tutorial island - has seen development restart. The original developer, and general FLOSS game hero, grumbel has been working on porting Pingus to SDL away from Clanlib. Whether this work will culminate in a release any time soon is another matter, but it is always nice to see forward motion.
The community for netPanzer, the formerly-commercial-now-GPL RTS, seem to be attempting to revive interest in the game. A new community site and resource site have cropped up and activity is high. Maybe development will restart?
Another project that is threatening to revive itself is Transport Empire. I have been very vocal in my criticism on the tt-forums of the bureaucratic approach that has strangled any intended development. One of the developers has had enough too and announced a simple cut-the-crap code-first approach to make the game happen, because discussions and design documents and fine-detail-planning had drowned any previous attempts.
The exciting freeware RTS project 0 A.D., in development for over 3 years so far, has a newish gameplay video up on their site. Check it out, it looks so cool. I wish they would release a demo but patience is a virtue and this game will be a scorcher when it is eventually released. Still, the lengthy development process is frustrating some fans, to which one of the developers made this rather poignant response which is worth a read if you [as a player] want to understand what free/Free game developers go through.
I'm going to have to stop there before this becomes an essay.
Music tip:
Precioso & Libex - Xperimental Scratch
