Winter Shorts 1: Word War Vi Laser Edition, Space Nerds in Space

SNiS Engineering screen

Stephen Cameron, one of my personal heroes of game development (Be The Wumpus), made Word War Vi support color laser projectors using the openlase library [blog post].

Word War vi driving RGB color laser projector with openlaser

Another project that our forum users were allowed to follow in this thread is Space Nerds in Space:

So this game (when it becomes a game) is very much inspired by Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator
See: artemis.eochu.com The idea is you have a game which is played much as the actors in the Star Trek TV series played their roles on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. There are a number of "stations": Navigation, Weapons, Science, Communications, etc. and each player assumes that role. Each station has it's own laptop or other computer which communicates via network to a central server which simulates the game universe. So it's kind of a cooperative multiplayer network game... No reason not to have multiple teams in multiple starships inhabiting the same server/universe either cooperating or doing battle.
Mine is different than Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator in that it is:
GPL'ed.
Linux/gtk
Probably uglier (lol).
Probably more scalable (yay vector graphics.)
Not even close to finished.

space nerds in space 2013 01 09

It will probably be a while until I'm in a room with enough Linux users to test play this game but when the time comes, I shall be prepared!

Scavenger: Atmospheric Open Source 2D Space Exploration

Image: Scavenger in-game credits

Scavenger is a simple space exploration game set in a large debris field, created by Fiona Burrows in December 2009.

It is polished, very atmospheric and expresses a subtle sense of humor inside item/object names.

Scavenger was voted 2nd place in the "overall" category at Ludum Dare 16 (48 hour dev jam). It recently was released in a github repository under MIT license (both code and art!).

The code is written in Python and runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Video: Scavenger

On her blog, Fiona writes about her development process:

1. Pick a simple idea and roll with it.
2. Never leave an unfinished feature.
3. If anything can be polished then do it - If an animation can be added to something then do it, if a small particle effect can be added here then do it.
4. Don't stress over running out of time. When it doubt, pretend this was the plan all along.

Winter Shorts 2: Wizznic! Mouse Input, Me and My Shadow New Look, Epiar Cleanup, GemRB Platforms and Games

Wizznic!

Wizznic! supports mouse & touchscreen. [Video] Code available on GitHub.

MeAndMyShadow

MeAndMyShadow 0.2rc1 is out. It features tutorial, in-game help, a new default visual style and an improved editor.

video: Epiar 0.5.0 game start

Epiar 0.5.0 has been released:

• UI clean-up
• Expanded missions system
• Sound and music additions
• Main menu
• Editor greatly expanded
• Misc. bug fixes

GemRB logo

GemRB 0.7.0 was released recently. Their wiki received a clean-up as well. The engine re-implementation runs on Android and iOS. BG, TotSC, BGII, ToB, IWD and HoW can be played start to end. Some features are missing and there are some new features too.

Wazzal (dx8 game) open sourced!

Wazzal in space

Wazzal is a single-player role-playing space trading and combat game that features a compact plot, ship-boarding mini-fights and allows to switch control between ships during team battles.


The recently open sourced game was made by Ville Mönkkönen of Instant Kingdom (IK). He is responsible for excellent freeware games including Notrium and is currently working on a for-pay top-down fantasy RPG.


IK community member Amarth shared some insight about what it would take to make Wazzal run on modern operating systems:

It will be a lot of work. DirectX calls (Windows only) are sprinkled all around the code. Then there are some references to the win32 api, though not many when compared with the DX ones. There are probably also some non-standard C++ Visual Studio-only things going on, but that shouldn't be too hard to fix either. DirectX is the big problem here.It also needs to be done, because Wazzal is written with the DirectX 8 library, which seems to be no longer supported in any way by Microsoft.

It's positively impossible to find the headers and libraries needed to compile this at Microsoft. I haven't tried other locations yet. It's probably not impossible to find, but who knows how well supported old libraries will be on newer versions of Windows...

The license for both code and assets is a very permissive one and likely to be compatible with MIT/zlib/3-BSD (and CC-BY for assets):

10 You are allowed to use the game source files and the included resource files in any way you wish, I only ask that you retain this license and credit me.