(please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings)
On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread.
Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily follow the latest releases.
Purely by chance, I found an obviously abandoned but still fun to play mini tower defense with a skippable tutorial level and two playable missions, beautiful graphics and performance settings.
To be a master is to spam en mass
So you place towers and the shoot enemies that move towards your base. I know this! Being an impatient player type, I skipped past the tutorial and was annihilated in level 1.
Short enough messages in a hard enough tutorial level
The degree of my destruction was such, that I was thankful for the tutorial being there at all. Even though I did die in it, it taught me enough about the all-or-nothing early game (which some might refer as to "unbalanced") to get my strategy right.
Turn off for speed. Turn on for awesome!
You get 3 towers: that allows you to build more tower, one that allows you to shoot more and one that shoots. You can block paths and create mazes. There are no tower upgrades and that's okay.
All the plot. Space to continue. Take that non-skip-able intro video AAA games!
Mission #3 is not possible to win (prove me wrong) but it was a great experience to find that I was able to beat the tutorial mission after all. By deviating from the given instructions! If that's not freedom (besides being open source) then I don't know what is!
Yeah right...
Come to think of it, the ridiculousness of level 3 practically speaks "dear player, you should totally fork and make new levels!"
Made with love2d
The last commit to Turres Monacorum was in May 2014 and the game was made at a game jam. My experience dictates that this won't be picked up by the original developers any more but to any player with love2d installed, it will come as a wonderful, visually polished snack!
This time it was the completely new open-source game Limit Load, self described as:
A cockpit flight game that is more of an arcade than a sim. The game is built on the Panda3D game engine. It is similar to the ancient games like the classic Wings or the very good Strike Commander. The story and the atmosphere are important elements of the game, so a lot of focus is placed on that too.
Here is some in-game action and it seems quite polished already for such a new game:
Licensing of assets is still a bit of a grey area it seems, but they are fully aware of it:
The game code is licensed under GPL 3, and custom-made game assets under CC-by-SA 4.0. Some of the assets were taken from "free" (as in "not sure in which way") sources on the Internet, so their licensing situation is unclear. Eventually these should be cleared for use or replaced.
Here is a description of the game we got from him:
In Wyrmsun, humans, elves and dwarves all seek to carve a place for themselves on their different homeworlds, with humans living on Earth, dwarves dwelling on Nidavellir, and elves inhabiting Alfheim. In the game's missions, each world follows separate storylines, but the various civilizations can be mixed and matched in custom games.
Wyrmsun features:
Retro-style graphics
2 playable civilizations, and a number of non-playable ones
18 quests to play, earning technology points which can be used to obtain new units, buildings and technologies
38 units, 30 buildings and 14 technologies
Units that can earn experience, being able to upgrade to new unit types or acquire new abilities upon level-up
Persistent heroes, who carry over their level and abilities throughout scenarios
Personal names and traits for units
Cave, Conifer Forest, Dungeon, Fairlimbed Forest and Swamp tilesets
33 maps of real and fictional locations to choose from, as well as random maps
Living environment, with fauna reproduction and predation
Very moddable game, with mod-loading capability built in
Grand strategy mode, where production is resolved on the strategic (world map) level, while battles are resolved on the tactical level
In-game encyclopedia, allowing players to learn more about the units, buildings and other elements of the game, as well as their historical and mythological sources of inspiration.
P.S.: Yes FOSS games can be on Steam as long as they don't integrate with closed source steam integration libraries; And it can be a great way to attract more users to your game and maybe even collect some donations or sell add-ons (preferably in a "release freely when sufficient funds are gathered" style). See this game for an successful example.
I had been following this really awesome looking tile based RTS 3D engine project (think Starcraft2 like) on the jMonkey Engine forums for a while, and it is now fully FOSS including the arts assets. Don't expect a playable RTS game, but as you can seen in this video of the in-game level editor a lot of work has been done already:
You can contribute to the MIT licensed source on their github page (the author asks for help) and/or head over to the website of engine it uses, jMonkeyEngine, a great project written in Java.
F-Zero and Wipeout set the standard for the futuristic sci-fi racing games genre and inspire many game developers.
Over the years, four projects of that genre were started and developed to a playable state that are now open source code:
H-Craft by Irrgheist is a free sci-fi racer with IAP on Android. It is built with the Irrlicht engine and was recently released as free software with freeware data.
While gameplay is simple without pickups, boosts or weapons, the campaign keeps it interesting. The 180°-Turns used in H-Craft level design are very refreshing to the genre.
CoreBreach is a commercial anti-gravity racing game with combat gameplay. There is a freeware dataset that allows compiling and playing a simpler-looking version.
Being an Objective C project, it was unusual to compile for me on latest Arch Linux but possible. Campaign mode, weapons and split-screen multiplayer make it cover many bases.
Racer is the only project with 100% free as in freedom data, yet unfortunately it does not compile on current Arch Linux.
Of our four projects, this is the only that has the classic drive-over boost fields.
Ecksdee is the oldest of the bunch and has challenging time trial single-player gameplay.
There are weapon pickups but without AI or human competitors they serve no purpose yet.
Project Comparison
H-Craft
CoreBreach
Racer*
Ecksdee
Latest Version
2015-02-23 (1.3)
2012-11-30 (git)
2010-10-10 (r349)
2006-11-24 (0.0.9)
Campaign Mode
yes
yes
no
no
Split-Screen Multiplayer
no
yes
yes
no
Weapons
no
yes
no
yes
AI
yes
yes
no
no
Gamepad Support
yes
yes
yes
no
Menu UI Look
good
ok
good
ok
Music
yes
yes
no
yes
Sounds
yes
yes
yes
yes
Linux Builds or Compiling
not tested, build used
complicated but compiles
fails
fails, win32 build/wine used
Art Asset License(s)
Mostly no-modify-no-distribute
no-distribution, GPL, CC-BY 3.0
CC-BY-SA 3.0
GPL, CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-NC-ND
Is It Cool?
yes
yes
yes
yes
* Could not build racer, reviewing from long term memory
Related projects
Stunt Rally has a F-Zero-esque antigrav vehicles and futuristic levels but primarily it's a car racing game. The default physics don't seem to be working for a futuristic racing style.
The cool Blender Game Engine project RGP has it's .blend file available but it does not have license information. The .blend contains no audio and only one level without AI.
HexGL is pretty but has no sound, no ai, only one level and is CC 3.0 BY-NC licensed (including code) at the moment. If anybody is interested in contributing: the developer indicated interest in the MIT license.
TheRush seem to be Windows-only and does not run in Wine.
Some nice developments on the 2D game-dev front lately, and as you will later see, 2D with full shader, real-time lights and so on can be a quite awsome way to make games, without having to hire a full team of 3D artists ;)
First of all a great new 2D editor, Overlap2D, has been released under the Apache2 license:
Contrary to other popular 2D editors (for example tiled or DAME), it is not tile based, has a modern renderer and also comes with a nice GUI editor. It currently exports to a standard JSON file and has a libGDX runtime.
Godot 1.1 BETA
Really awesome are also the latest developments of the (often described as the open-source Unity) Godot engine which you can now easily try. For me the coolest new features are the new dynamic lights (shown here in the also new isometric game sample):
This of course requires a bit more than simple 2D sprites ;) If you want to create cool 2D normal-maps, this should give you an simple way to create them. Also very nice is the now working graphical/node-based shader editor:
