Tutorials

It is commonly known that one of the major problems with volunteer game projects is lack of man power, which usually means that a few aspects that you come to expect in commercial titles tend to be neglected in Free games.

One such aspect is tutorials. Many Free games are clones inspired by older commercial games, and as such assume familiararity with those games. This makes them incredibly difficult for a new player to get into without having to ask lots of seemingly obvious questions and that turns people off.

Examples...

I saw FreeLords 0.3.8 had a Windows binary so I thought I'd check it out. I know, I know, there's a manual [which incidently took about 7 clicks to get to from the frontpage - scandalous web design!] but reading that isn't fun. Playing is fun. Tutorials are teaching-whilst-playing. No tutorial, unsure of what to do, my interest quickly waned and I was back surfing brain sewage the Internet.

Another example - FreeCol. Just what the hell are hammers? I can't assign them, they're not a resource, and I was unable to build anything. The game looks great but if I can't play it I'm not having fun, so I quit and move on.

The message? No, I'm not griping about the games, the message is a constructive one; tutorials mean much higher player retention rates. People, generally, play games for fun. That means if they are not having fun from the outset, interest is quickly lost and there are many other games to play. Don't expect too much too soon from your players if you want to keep their interest in the game. Tutorials are probably one of the better investments of your limited resources and I believe should be part of any open source game development process.

I love monitoring forums like Vega Strike's. Why? Because every now and again somebody posts a model like this. Georgeous. I've seen that guy, Oblivion, start as somebody producing very amateur images and through motivation and desire become somebody who produces jaw dropping models and renders. He also contributes to the Angels Fall First project.

After an extended outage the forums are back up. They should be more reliable from now onwards.

Day of the 0.9x

Blob Wars: Blob and Conquer 0.90 is out! A 3D follow up to the 2D platformer Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid, Blob and Conquer looks like it is shaping up nicely from the gameplay videos on the website.

It makes me happy to see Snowballz 0.9 released. This RTS now has an OpenGL backend so should run a bit better on faster systems. What I like about Snowballz is it's not just another RTS clone, with the generic C&C style gameplay traits. It has lots of character and original gameplay ideas and I can't wait to play it. I would now but I just finished watching De La Hoya lose to Mayweather and it's 5am or something silly.

FreeTrain will see another release soon as work continues at a frantic pace. The translation to English has gotten quite a bit of interest in the game and there are now 3 developers working on it with hopefully more joining in over the next few weeks, there should be regular improvements and subsequent updates.

With that in mind, it is time for Free Gamer to push for another community effort. So far a revival of Emilia Pinball is the leading contender. If anybody can think of another game they would like to see development rekindled, please comment here or on the Free Gamer forums.

Another option might be to push for a new game idea. I'd love to see an open source game inspired by the DOS game Castles. I loved that game and the gameplay concept is nice and simple meaning it shouldn't be too hard to implement and improve - you design and build a castle and then defend it from invaders! It's really cool to design the perfect castle and watch it build and there is a lot of scope for gameplay extensions.

Hmm... Pinball or Castles... or do you have a better idea? :-)

Fallout 3 Tech Demo released to Public Domain

Well I guess the big scoop is that the Van Buren aka Fallout 3 tech demo has been released to the public domain so is now Free Software. I wonder if the community will pick it up and make it work properly - apparently it is quite far away from being a playable game but my laptop is low on disk space so I can't find out right now.

I'll leave blurb to other sites.

Remember I mentioned a Gunbound clone effort that started in the Ubuntu Forums? Well, it is now called i-team, has a set of characters - how cool do they look!!? - and the guy has finished coding pixel perfect collision detection. It is moving ahead nicely and perhaps we'll see a game sooner rather than later emerging from this effort. :-)

I lamented yesterday that the game Bloboats wasn't available for download for Ubuntu. Well, d'oh, that's because it is in the Ubuntu repos but to be fair it did not say that on the Bloboats downloads page. Well I got an email from the author (thanks :-) and hopefully he'll correct that omitted detail.

I will stop by mentioning Soldat. 2D Quake-like war game worms style. Not open source. Only runs on Linux with WINE. But is cool. 'Nuff said.

This post was a bit disjoint and unelaborate. Perhaps my standards are slipping!

Allacrost and Free Allegiance

Hero of Allacrost

There's some new screenshots over at the Hero of Allacrost project. It is looking really nice these days and they have come a long way. They are looking for people to help test out their next release so head on over to their forums if you are interested. :-)

Speaking of forums, have you registered for the Free Gamer Forum yet? Why not? ;-)

Bloboats - a side-scrolling race against the clock whilst dodging obstacles by using the way the boat interacts with the water. Think X-Moto meets the sea. It is cross platform but only Windows binaries are officially provided :-( so you either have to compile from source or try the unofficial Mandriva 2007 rpms or hope the guys at getdeb get on it. (I'm an Ubuntu user, can't you tell!?)

Free Allegiance is the open source community effort spawned from Microsoft releasing the source code to their [now abandoned] game Allegiance. (See, MS are not all evil, just mostly.) Damn, I forgot to mention this a while back when I did an article on open source 3D space games.

Free Allegiance

Free Allegiance is a multiplayer teamplay-oriented 3D space combat game. I like the fact that it focuses on teamplay. It can be difficult for new players (don't make me say n00bs) to get into online games with more experienced players mopping them up repeatedly. However if it is a team game, the experienced players can take on leadership roles, and by virtue of that, mentoring those of lesser ability experience.

Oh, and the game looks pretty too. Always a plus. :-D

Super Retro Mega Wars... at the moment, just a blog on the development of a retro mega game - a multiplayer environment where each player gets to choose the type of game they play (all game types based on retro classics) and somehow the game types get mixed together. Anyway, it's an intriguing concept so I'm gonna keep an eye on it.

I should probably give Second Life a mention at some point... it is open source after all. Just they don't really need the marketing help. And I think games should be fun and immersive but not a second life. Right?

The title of today's blog post is so unimaginative. I'm not feeling very creative today.

FreeTrain and Lots of Games

I absolutely have to start with FreeTrain. The first release of the translated game is now available. It is currently Windows only (tied to DirectX) and needs .NET but the medium term goal is to port FreeTrain to SDL and Mono so it can become cross platform.

The download has been available for a few days but some documentation was needed so I held off mentioning it until now. Some tutorials have been put up so it is now possible to play the game without some seriously lucky guess work.

Hedgewars (screenshots), like Worms / Wormux but with Hedgehogs! The number of Worms clones seems to be on the up. Perhaps it's going to need it's own award category - "Best Worms Clone!" ;-)

I can't remember whether I mentioned it before, but Those Funny Funguloids (TFF) is now available for Linux. Also, Ubuntu packages have been created for I Have No Tomatoes which is written by the same guys as TFF.

That was some major linkage for one paragraph. ;-)

TFF is a top-down "mushroom collecting" arcade game with lovely 3D graphics. Check out the gameplay video for a better idea of what it's like. I like TFF because it's a simple concept executed with panache.

Blocktality is a top down shooter. It's Windows only :-( but there is a cross platform open source game that it looks very similar to (and not Loose Cannon), only the name of that game eludes me for the moment. I must be getting old or something, losing my marbles.

Jump'n'Bump

Super Mario Wars is like a contemporary version of Jump'n'Bump except it is not gorily cute rather than just cute.

Y'know what game is cool? Oolite. This Elite-inspired game takes the classic to a whole new level. Anyway, I mention it only because there's a gameplay video showing off exactly what it's about for those who are curious - not everybody is old enough (or geeky enough?) to remember Elite. :-)

People think Liquid War development is dead. It isn't, it just moved to become part of the GNU project under the project title Liquid War 6. Initially, it will only be a Linux-only game, which makes a refreshing change from the plethora of Windows-only titles I keep talking about.

Speaking of talking, I've talked enough. s/talked/written/. s/written/blogged/. s/blogged/rambled/. s/enough/of/this/now/.

Free Gamer Forums and Awards 2007

As you probably don't know, May 25th is the 1st birthday of Free Gamer. :-D

To signify this momentus occasion, and because I've always wanted to do this, I'm going to run the first official Free Gamer awards!

The purpose of the awards is to not only recognise the best the open source game scene has to offer, but also inspire those striving to bring us new and original free games, so I'm looking for ideas and feedback on how to organise the award categories. I especially don't want a predictable set of categories (Wesnoth and Frozen Bubble shouldn't win everything they go in for) and I definitely want to acknowledge upcoming games as much as the popular ones. I'm thinking that the categories could be based more on game aspect rather than genres i.e. most original, best storyline, best artwork, etc. I also don't want too many awards so they stay fairly meaningful - but not too few so they are not predictable and recognise more than a couple of games. Of course, all this needs planning...

So, with great pleasure, I am happy to announce the unveiling of the official Free Gamer Forums, kindly hosted by freeforums.org who provide an awesome service for, it seems, no gain whatsoever.

Discussion on the format of the awards is welcome both here [in the comments] and in the forums where I have started a thread for discussion on the award categories.

My hope is that the FG forums can become a little hive of activity around open source gaming and provide a great resource where developers and players alike can share and help eachother to consolidate the vibrant (if a little disorganised :-) open source and free gaming scene.

My plan of world domination for the awards is to have 2 weeks for votes to be cast, which should be enough time to effectively canvas the open source game playing community. That gives us 10 days to come up with and finalise the voting categories.

Also if anybody wants to create some cool graphics to hand out to the award winners, please volunteer because I am (you might be surprised to know) quite a busy person. :-)

I did have some game news but I'm saving it until tomorrow. ;-)

Scourge and SoulFu

Scourge 0.18 (download) has been released. :-)

If you don't know, Scourge is a 3D RPG game inspired by top-down old school isometric-ish games e.g. Exult. Scourge tries to blend classic gameplay with modern graphics. It has a light hearted plot but is designed to be easily moddable. As the game progresses, in the future I hope to see a few cool mods crop up. I personally really like Scourge because I've watched the development for several years and helped a little here and there.

Scourge 0.18 brings a revamped UI, localization and translations, and a slew of bug fixes. It is starting to shape into a nice game and really the only major task they have to really tackle to make this a very distinctive and brilliant Free game is to sort out some proper character models. The current set are just bits and pieces Gabor Torok (Scourge author) managed to find online.

It's ironic that many projects seem to have either only programmers or only artists, and struggle to find the ideal balance for development. I have contemplated setting up a site where open source games can make calls for help with programming, artwork, or modelling, since at the moment it's just a case of hoping somebody with the right skill and interest eventually finds your game project - there is no centralized resource for organizing open source game development and I think one is increasingly needed as the number of people creating free software games keeps rising.

SoulFu

Aaron Bishop, the original author of Egoboo (see Egoboo Resurrection for current versions) has finally finished his latest game after 4 years of development. SoulFu is currently only available for Windows but he is planning Linux and Mac versions of the game. The game is freeware but maybe after some time he'll open source it like he did with Egoboo.

You can see the graphical similarities between SoulFu and Egoboo, the chunky cutesy character models, but the graphics look a little more refined in SoulFu. It looks fun but my Windows machine is too pap to play it so perhaps a few readers could comment on what the gameplay is like. There are a couple of gameplay videos [1, 2] from earlier on in development just to give an idea of what how SoulFu plays.

Edit - hey, you have to pay money for the full SoulFu experience :-( that really sucks (no mention on the webpage) and I'm frustrated that I mentioned it now!

There's been some interest on the Ubuntu forums about making a Gunbound-like game. For those who don't know, Gunbound (gameplay video) is kinda like Worms only with fancier graphics and weapons. If this project goes ahead, I hope they look at working with the Wormux crew who have an engine capable of 90% of the needs of this project-in-planning.