Shotgun Debugger

In Shotgun Debugger, you play a hacker on the run from black-shades-agents and fight against armies of droids. Projectile and energy weapons serve your cause, the most original of which gets reflected by walls and can be used to destroy enemies out of sight.

Game mechanics include damage-inducing surfaces, exploding barrels and droids and simple press-the-button or find-the-key tasks. The story progresses in text boxes which appear between levels.

Varying level styles...

Relatively simple puzzles...

Various weapons, including grenades...

... a kind of 'blue rocket launcher'...

... and a reflecting laser rifle

Shotgun Debugger has two problems: default control and perspective, thus here are two hints for playing the game:

1. Press 'v'. It will fix the perspective.
2. Use WASD and mouse (or set different keys in ~/.sdb/preferences.txt)

Also, here's one hint, in case you get stuck in the first level: "behind the police car". I didn't know about 'v' and the police car hint the first time I tried sdb about a year ago and gave up on the game after starting level one for the 20th time. :)

The game is rather hard and there are no save function, except between levels. Enemies mostly hit hard and I found careful movement and taking cover to be the safest way to finish it.

SDB gameplay [small .ogg | big .ogg]

Code and assets are both GPLed and levels are editable in the SVG vector format. Inkscape was used to create the 2D (but rendered in 3D) levels! The level sources, are available on the homepage. I also want to recommend the 'trivia' section there.

Part of one of sdb's levels, viewed in Inkscape

I think that with such level editing capabilities and mechanics (exploding and movable barrels) some interesting levels could be easily produced. I only need to figure out how to load levels independent of story mode.

Shotgun Debugger is probably the best 'pure action' (no base building or 'advanced' item collecting or xp-gathering involved) top-down shooter I have played so far and it's definitely worth giving a shot.

PS: If you're desperate for a windows version, over here!

Free as in F..Dragon History.. and cyberpunk

Some of Dragon History's GPLv2-ed assets

You might remember this video-heavy post about Dragon History, a comical fantasy adventure game for ScummVM. I wanted to inform you that the game art, including music, graphics and text are all covered by the GPLv2. They can be downloaded here.

The game is originally written in Czech and properly translated to the Polish language. If you have the necessary language skills and want to make the game accessible to a wider audience, it would be great if you could work on cleaning up the English translation. The contact information of the maintainer is on his homepage. If you want to turn this into a team project, feel free to use FreeGameDev's general forum for a thread.


Speaking of free assets: The current OpenGameArt friday challenge is "Near Future" and I have no idea what to.. hm.. cyberpunk?

To the six finished challenges, 50 pieces of game art have been submitted. It's quite fun to follow new art and picking the best pieces, so don't let the submission forms discourage you from joining in. ;)


Oh, and speaking of cyberpunk, the quite awesome soundtrack to the hacker game Endgame: Singularity has been uploaded in .ogg and source form to OGA. And the minimal-graphics single-player HTML5 turn-based strategy game Evil Cult has a great feel to it when you play it while listening to that (kind of) music.


PS: Silly me forgot to include my source of information for the art licensing of Dragon History. It's email communication with the project maintainer. :)

Penumbra engine open source (non-free 32bit library dependancy)

Penumbra 1's engine now FOSS

The engine of the best proprietary horror game in existence (Penumbra Overture) has been released under GPLv3, and some parts under even more liberal licenses. The engine features a physics interaction system, which is extremely well-balanced between complexity of possible interactions and intuitive usability. A few test maps and some objects and textures were released under By-Sa-3 (in comparison: Lugaru comes with no freely-licensed assets).

The textures that come with Penumbra

There is a guide available on how to compile Penumbra and you can get some help on #penumbra or on the official forums. The biggest task is to get rid of the legacy Newton Dynamics dependency and replace it with Bullet. This 'procedure' has been applied to DungeonHack a year ago or so.

About Lugaru: there is a thread that contains some thoughts on adding free (faif free hopefully) content to it.