Sintel The Game

Link

Ever since the announcement of Project Durian, with its press release stating the aim of making a dark fantasy film aimed at young adults, I've been dreaming of the game they'll make using the assets and setting. The more the project developed, the more I drooled over the potential; it had all the necessary prerequisites for a fantasy action game/rpg: an epic quest, awesome fighting scenes, dragons...

Screen from the Sintel Open Movie

But time passed and nothing showed up; the Blender Foundation showed no plans for another official Blender Game Engine project... Until a bunch of unaffiliated Blender artists decided to have a crack at making the project themselves without the official sponsorship of the Foundation, and started the Sintel The Game project (yay Free Culture).

Free Gamer has been a bit tardy in these developments though, the Sintel the Game project started just before July last year and have gotten pretty far in that time (a bit further than the Apricot/YoFrankie project? /snark).
One thing that I find worrying about the project is their closed development process and uncoordinated web presence. There isn't an open  repository where people can view the progress of code development, a forum where a community can grow and contribute, an IRC channel where developers can chat (disclaimer: I might be wrong on these; but their site doesn't indicate that any of these rather essential open development services exist; which is a rather big communication failure).

Seriously ^

On top of this game has been a bit sparse on news updates; they have a Facebook Group that is a bit more active than their blog; but both are updated far from daily. Rather worrying indeed.

They seem to be following the YoFrankie development model, the two sites are almost identical in the information which they provide; and we all know how that turned out...

Nevertheless; the game still looks incredibly promising. It succeeding, however, wouldn't be a victory for open game development; only for open games.

AncientBeast and FreezingMoon

Now, on the opposite side of the adver-spectrum, I present AncientBeast, a Norse-mythology inspired multiplayer strategy game with roleplaying elements that has been in development for quite a while.

It has a huge web presence, with a Facebook group, Twitter  account (hiss use identi.ca), Miro video group (nice!), DeviantArt group with tonnes of awesome art... We'll have to see what license they fall under in the end, the team are still pondering how they'll make an open game that can sponsor a couple of beers for the devs.

See those circles? They show progress of the individual
aspects of unit development

Their development methodology is rather interesting as well, from the use of a shared Dropbox account to collaborate and share art, to the rather excellent Bestiary system they've developed to introduce players to the different units in the game, their stats and abilities, and show the development progress of the indicated unit. That's some AAA level stuff there guys.

One of many timelapses and tutorials

Another remarkable thing about their development process is how well documented their art production is... They have loads of timelapses and tutorials of the team's artists creating concepts and models, I can almost confidently state that it's the biggest repository of its kind in open gaming.

One thing to keep in mind though is that coding wise they've only broken the ice. They've started implementing the game using the Blender Game Engine, but in the 2 years since the original designs were written up the most awesome art has been produced and the programming side of things have stayed relatively silent until recently; something not many other FOSS games can attest to. So if you know Python/BGE, this would be a very good time to jump in and help out.

Speaking of ice, the AncientBeast's development team, FreezingMoon has a bunch of Blender 2.5 and other FOSS asset creation tool tutorials on their site, and are looking for more submissions. It would be awesome if they could collaborate with OGA on that, in my uneducated opinion :)

If this post has interested you, be sure to drop in on their IRC channel, they have both a webchat page and a tutorial to get a desktop IRC client running

FOSS party games

*%&§$! Get of my lawn, err blog you crazy machine-gun style bloggers ;) You are making my "one post a month" style look very bad! And I can't even find a day to fit my blog-posts in...

Ok anyways... today I have a more sensitive topic... yes FOSS gamers have lives too. Hard to believe I know, but out there (yes, outside of your parents basement... the place where yo go for geo-caching) people have real parties (without the LAN- suffix) and they use FOSS games during those occasions! At least some do ;)

Some of these strange species can be seen in the following promotional video for Performous (beware SFW underage nerd chick action):

Performous video

Performous is a all-in-one party game, meaning you will have the choice to embarrass yourself in front of your best friends (or clueless cannon fodder as we FPS hardcore gamers say ;) ) either by singing, dancing, drumming or strumming (e.g. guitar playing) (embarrassment level in the same order). But of course... Karaoke is only fun super drunk anyways... so you just have to fear the You-tube videos of your performance the next day ;)

Speaking of Karaoke: There are two other FOSS applications for that. Canta and Ultrastar Deluxe neither of which I have tried, but they probably do the job fine. And for dancing (well if you can call it this way... call me old fashioned but for me dancing normally includes a woman, preferably very close ;) ) there is the granddaddy of all FOSS party-games: Stepmania. But yeah, you will need to have one of those dancing mat controllers you can pick up cheaply on Ebay.

My personal favorite however is FoFix, a fork of the pretty well known crazy keyboard destroying FretsOnFire.

FoFix gameplay

FoFix adds most notably multi-player and full band support to the guitar only experience of FoF. Oh and yes...it does support more pretty (albeit non-FOSS) themes from its commercial counterparts if you fear your non FOSS-gamer friends will be shocked by common programmer's art ;)