Showing posts with label hex-a-hop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hex-a-hop. Show all posts

Bitfighter, "Cat Sokoban", JVGS, pseudoform, Gun-Fu Deadlands, Hex-a-Hop, racr.. and YouTube overkill

All subscribers to the FGD Planet feed (RSS/Atom) probably would want to add this feed. We split the planet into a game news planet and a development news planet. The latter contains game developer blogs and game engine news.

Bitfighter is a no-gravity multi-player 2-D combat game with a cool name, cool looks, good controls and a quick way to get started. I like the visual style a lot too. (Which reminds of Word War vi by the way.) Unfortunately I was unable to compile on my 64-bit desktop so far (only on my 32-bit netbook).

The video recording qualities of my portable device are weak, so the video I recorded is .. broken. It plays 3x faster than it is supposed to. What you see in it is me flying on an empty server at 500ms latency, trying out the the "mines" and the "burst" weapons.

A game with an even more awesome name is The Villany of Cat Food Inc., which introduced on our forums as a little puzzle game, which I found to be a sokoban-like with interesting and weirdly cute story.

JVGS is the latest game brainchild of the author of Fall of Imiryn. It is a black and white "poem platformer" meaning you (sometimes) jump on platforms made of words -_-. The style is based on xkcd while the levels are based on .svg files - they are pre-rendered for use in the game though. The feeling is melancholic.. The controls are... not polished.. The video has been recorded...

Pseudoform.. aka portalized. aka Open Source Portal. It looks impressive! The game relies on non-free physics and sound libraries but the developers wish to change that. They are also thinking about using the Cube2 engine (although Cube2's main developer considers adding decent physics to his engine as equally challenging as creating an own engine).

Ah Gun-Fu Deadlands (GFD), you are pain, but even more pleasure, simple and forgiving but non-forgiving also. It is a specimen of retro 2D graphics wild west keyboard-move, mouse-aim game. One shot and you die but you also have unlimited lives and unlimited bullets. The lovely piece uses LÖVE. (Version 0.5, so watch your back!) It Is pretty much fantastic and well-received, according to the comments made on GFD's forum.

Do you like to stalk? Gun-Fu Deadlands' dad can be spotted in this photo!

Two years have passed since this blog last mentioned Hex-a-Hop. The project now has new developers (the original author disappeared it seems) and some sounds have been added to the game. The following might be the first recording of the game with sound/music! Who knows, maybe it will convince you to try it if you have not yet...

Are you a fan of Trophy and/or Racer and sad about these two not developing further [BEEP Racer's last release was 24th Dec 2009, shame on my research!] or do you just like top-down racing games? Maybe the new, early-development racr will give you hope.

I have something rather off-topic for you: a 5-headed team that is working on a audio editor and a video editor is looking for #6 in San Francisco, USA. Both their products are rather minimal so far. Let's call this news content-creation-related. :)

By the way: Having problems with the YT videos? I found youtube-dl to be an excellent tool for downloading videos for off-line/no-lag/no-flash-crash-risk watching of videos. `youtube -bt URL1 URL2 ...` will download the best quality and use titles in file names.

Making sounds, building models, playing games

Hi there, I'm new here but let's get straight to the point.


sfxr

While browsing through the Ludum Dare contest's blog, I found a nifty little tool which generates 8-bitish sfx, without me having to know anything about sound synthesis. It's called sfxr and was made by Tomas Pettersson. License unknown. You can download it for win32 and *nix (run 'make') systems.

The other awesome thing is the first FreeGameDev.net modelling contest. The mission is to create rts industrial-style buildings under free licenses. The competition ends when February begins. Ironically, I tripped over a similar contest in a forum, where I told about the FGD contest.


Hex-a-hop

Yesterday I realized, that Charlie never mentioned (oh snap he did, under the name Hex-a-pop) the totally awesome puzzle game Hex-a-hop. It's homepage is dead, but the game survived at Debian. I also was able to retrieve a half-broken archive (linux source/build) using the Wayback machine. Try the game or at least give it to your kids!

Charlie once mentioned AstroMenace, but did he tell that Viewizard released it's source and media under the GPL v3? It works like a charm, copying some files, 'cmake .', 'make', './AstroMenace' and I see a game menu with spaceships flying in it's background on my display.


OpenAstroMenace

The game looks sharp and the gameplay is impressive for an top-down (or down-top?) arcade. I also have to mention that my subwoofer likes the explosions' sounds. My neighbours noticed it too.

I sure hope that some arcade freaks will soon take the game and improve it (Menu gui is a bit confusing, levels could contain a bit more diversity, enemies could drop temporary upgrades.) But for now: go get it!