I have outed myself previously as not a big Minecraft fan, so take everything in this post with a grain of salt (as I obviously don’t really understand that genre).
Anyways… recently this sub-reddit for open-source games was pointed out in our forums, and while it isn’t really as lively as others (for example the Linux gaming one) it pointed out an new project called Iceball:
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| Pre-alpha Iceball screenshot |
Seemingly made by people not happy with the recent commercialization of Ace of Spades, it’s an all FOSS remake, those early development you can follow here (or on their Github page).
Now maybe the graphics are lacking on purpose (see disclaimer above), but I couldn’t help to think: why for f***’s sake did they have to reinvent the wheel with their own engine instead of using for example Terasology:
Or Minetest, or the Ardorcraft API for that matter???
Ahh well, at least it made me aware that Terasology is still very much under development, and with its focus on DungeonKeeper & Dwarf-Fortress elements, it might actually become a game I would play (and doesn’t make my eyes bleed :p ).
Speaking of which… the guy behind AgentKeeper released yet another nice video and graphics are constantly further improved as seen here.
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.
On her blog, Fiona writes about her development process:
- Pick a simple idea and roll with it.
- Never leave an unfinished feature.
- 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.
- Don’t stress over running out of time. When it doubt, pretend this was the plan all along.