Lavirinto 3D 0.6.0, Balazar 3 0.1, OpenAnno 2008.1, Pandora 2008 ordering deadline

Lavirinto 3D 0.6.0

Lavirinto 3D brings Zen wisdom, Pipes and Pac-Man together. It's a 3D version of the game Zenji [video].

The colorful levels and friendly music made me quite enjoy the stay and I even finished all campaigns. I noticed only one rudeness of the game: if you loose all your lives, you have to re-play all the levels of the campaign. :|

The game is written in Java (using lwjgl) and thus runs on every machine with a Java runtime environment installed. Just use the .sh or .bat script! The code is GPL and most of the media too. Some sounds were taken from Soundsnap, which is an non-free resource, and will be replaced soon.

Four people were involved in the creation: One lead designer, developer and visual artist, one assistant texture artist, one assistant developer and one musician. I think the end product is handsome.

Balazar 3, 2D version

Balazar 3 was released. It's a room-based slash and hack game, with some nice graphics in both 2D and 3D mode. It also supports multiplayer games.

Not being able to figure out how to install the latest Soya3D version, I only tested the 2D version. So far it feels very prototype-like: no plot, no quests, few enemy types. But the existing graphics look nice and most feature seem implemented. A little more work and it could become a nice time waster.

OpenAnno 2008.1 settlement

The real-time/city building strategy game OpenAnno was finally release [video] on October the first. You can download this first milestone for 32/64 bit GNU/Linux systems and 32 bit Windows systems.

I was hesitant to try it, fearing it would come not even close to it's role model Anno 1602 but when I tested it, I began to feel the fun of building the settlement and I wanted to build (not-yet implemented whoopsie) lumberjacks to build more houses to rise the population count so I could finally have (not yet existent) masons who would get stone from the (hopefully soon existing) mountains, so I would be able to improve the paths to pretty and speedy stone roads...

For a tech demo: nice! Of course the controls are not as nice as they probably will be but I'm eagerly waiting for the next release now! One thing though: the absence of mountains causes agoraphobia in me..

Detail of older Pandora concept render

In case you feel like pre-ordering the Pandora handheld GNU/Linux console: you have one more day. Next chance will be in 2009. The price range is 330-380 USD / 260 EUR / 200 GBP depending on what continent you order it on.

Game & engine news cluster

Nebula from FreeOrion

So let's see... what's going on in the open source gaming world today?

On the forum of FreeOrion are a bunch of awesome looking nebulae. Nice desktop backgrounds and even nicer galaxy view backgrounds!

I started a small smiley making competition for LÖVE. You can win a copy of a print version of my favorite web comic!

OpenDungeons' map editor

OpenDungeons (to be renamed) has been started and a forum was created on the FreeGameDev.net forums. "Another Dungeon Keeper clone!" you say? Well, the thing is that Dungeon Digger's development kind of stagnated... And the other thing is that Dungeon Keeper is/was pretty awesome...

So far, the game features a simple level editor (which I slightly fell in love with already - just think of the possibilities!) and some neat monsters are preparing for their way into the project's CVS!

There have been multiple (mostly bugfixing) releases of the action platform game Blob Wars : Blob And Conquer. But I have two problems with the game: 1. The controls are explosively sensitive and I was so far unable to overcome the first platform sequence in the first level. 2. The turning speed of my character is depending on the distance between bob and the camera, so when bob is standing back to a wall, it will be impossible to aim because the turning speed will be 40 degrees per 1 point mouse movement...

This apparently will not change:

Please note: the camera is not going to get much better than this. Minor niggles, etc. can be ironed out, but a full blown, intelligent and dynamic camera, as found in many multi million dollar budget games is not going to happen.

You can take a look at the first level of the game and at my issues with it in this gameplay video.

Also let me tell you that I appreciate very much, how Parallel Realities gave Blob Wars : Metal Blob Solid a nice story and setting, and made it a fun to play game. So I'm not giving up on the 3d platform/shooter just yet!

I just found out that ja2-stracciatella, is based on the unfree (although open) Jagged Alliance 2 source code. :( Thanks to Lightkey of Holarse (de) for giving me the license link!

FIFE's map editor

FIFE 2008.1 has been released! The flexible, isometric 2d game engine has seen many changes: It is now licensed under the LGPL (GPL before), dependencies have been removed (no more tinyxml), it features a small example game and muuuuuuch moooooooore.

What *really* makes me interested in this release, is the inclusion of a map editor! I unfortunately haven't been able to compile FIFE (apparently due to an error in the unstable Debian sid distribution), so as soon as I install Arch Linux, I'll be bombarding you with mapping videos again!

FIFE Is no Fallout Emulator btw!

Nice render for OpenAnno

Speaking of FIFE: OpenAnno 2008.0 was completed (the game uses FIFE as an engine.) There have been some art and code and documentation additions. And new teammates also! :) OpenAnno will be represented at a german indy game dev meeting that I'll be visiting this weekend.

This just in: Simutrans 100.0 (r1867) has been released! Last time I checked it, the game was a Transport Tycoon Deluxe clone with pretty graphics and a deadly/unfair AI.