Erebus is a hack & slash role-playing game under heavy development, yet playable with currently three missions.
Features:
Classic point-n-click style RPG, with dungeons to explore, enemies to fight, NPCs to talk to, sub-quests to complete, scenery to interact with, weapons, treasure and other items to find.
Also supports Rogue-like keyboard controls.
Multiple quests (currently three, more will be added as development progresses!)
Choice of starting characters (currently Barbarian, Elf, Halfling, Ranger, Warrior).
Start straight into the action – none of this “For your first quest, please find your next door neighbour’s pet cat”.
Vector-based world rather than tile-based – so items/scenery can be placed in any position, or aligned in any direction.
2D animated graphics, with zoom in/out, and lighting effects.
Completely free and Open Source – no ads, unlike many free Android apps.
User interface optimised to work with mouse, keyboard and/or touchscreen.
Cross-platform – available for Windows, Linux, Nokia Symbian and Android devices.
Code License:GPLv3+ Content License: Various (Most DFSG approved, CC-BY 2.x might be problematic)
PyWeek is a game jam that obviously goes on for one week and requires the use of Python. It takes place online and there are overall winners in team and solo categories, as well as awards. The dates of the 16th PyWeek challenge are 00:00 UTC April 14, 2013 to 00:00 UTC April 21, 2013. Registration opens on 15. March 2013.
There is a message board for the community and there are interesting methods to publish Python games as HTML/JavaScript using pyjs, as demonstrated by the PyWeek #15 entry Kaos.
License Requirements: At least Shared Source required. Free software licenses recommended.
Various fonts are being used, some of which might be problematic license-wise for including in for example Debian’s official repositories but it should be possible to replace them in less than two hours including research and documentation.
Code License: GPLv2 Content License: Unclear
Valyria Tear: “Final Release of Half-Episode I”
New Valyria Tear GUI screens
Valyria Tear Half-Episode I has been released, which I suppose we can take as 50% of Episode I’s acts being complete.
The release brings new graphical interfaces and development is ongoing.
An OS X version can now also be grabbed from the OSX thread.
The OpenMW engine re-implementation for proprietary RPG classic Morrowind brings fixes, a pause menu, camera modes and proper player control, potion usage, drain/fortify dynamic stats/attributes magic effects and other changes in release 0.17.0.
Work has also begun on an Editor and The Example Suite.
A Free-as-in-Freedom OpenMW game?
The Example Suite is going to be a small standalone game that does not contain any Bethesda owned art assets. Therefore, even those who do not own Morrowind will be able to play with OpenMW and test it.
The project uses the “Release early and often” mantra and so hopefully we will have an early build available for download soon.
If you can help with; skills in animating, music, sounds, modeling or are an experience modder please visit The Example Suite forum.
An editor for OpenMW!
The OpenMW Editor is necessary in order to implement the post 1.0 features that the original Morrowind engine isn’t capable of. It’s currently a one man project and he could use some help. Visit the OpenMW Editor forum.
The Flight of the Maxima (TFM) is an unlikely fusion of Sci-fi, dark comedy and medieval Christianity.
It is a free roaming roleplaying computer game where you can explore vast lands, talk to an extremely diverse amount of people, and do a lot of crazy things that certainly sounded like a good idea at the time.
There’s also a central story element that begins with you suddenly finding yourself a long way from home and dealing with… well let’s not spoil things just yet.
The game can run on Linux and Windows, is intended to run on Mac (untested as of late), and both the games code and it’s assets are Open Source (BSD), which means you can modify and redistribute the game nearly any way you want.
The game compiles fine for example on Arch Linux 64bit (with these hints). One license problem is the use of non-free FMOD but if I understand correctly, that dependency is optional.
Haunts: The Manse Macabre is a BSD-code/CC-BY-NC-SA-art Kickstarter-funded, turn-based RPG(?). There are still a few hours left to contribute to additional features.
Sintel: The Game, currently completely CCBY3-licensed, just had their first alpha release! They have original voice acting and all! (Although I did not manage to get it running on Linux yet).
Irrlicht-based cute Puzzle Moppet has been released under the WTFPL and I was able to replace all non-free textures and sounds. Now all we need is a repository coordinator.
Valyria Tear is a continuation of the jRPG Hero of Allacrost project with an active development blog.
Frogatto is a well-designed-code, beautiful-proprietary-pixel-art platformer. The developers started “making friends” on their blog by talking about projects they like.
idTech3 was reviewed in an extensive, illustrated article.
A discussion about OpenGameArt‘s usability for game developers started on their forums. Improvements were recently added to the texture section and this is a chance to formulate enhancement to the other sections.
Linus Torvalds not only showed his annoyance with Nvidia but also his love towards open source games in a recent talk (goto 58m20s).
ctdabomb, an active community member, converted and license-clarified the Art Museum SuperTuxKart racing track over the time span of about one and a half months, after asking the community for support.
SuperTux, a cute platformer, needs help finishing an animated owl sprite. To the left, you can see the current placeholder graphics.
FLARE, a hack’n'slash RPG engine and game, requested translations via email, pull request or forum post.
So my recent rant resulted in a lively discussion about ARPGs, but sadly not really in any contributions or new contributors for Summoning Wars so far… but maybe that was too much to hope for
Anyways, another project I mentioned was just recently updated:
Lips of Suna is now available as Version 0.6 (release notes on our forums) and this release marks the first official release with OGRE3D as the rendering engine. In my rant I dissed that rendering engine a bit due to the lack of good content creation tools (yes I know, not their focus or intention), but at least here it seems to have been put to a good use.
In somewhat unrelated news, there is also a new version of OpenMW, which is continuing at their current fast pace to reimplement that well known RPG. Change-log can be also found in our forums.
DccNiTghtmare (DNT) is a 3D single-player RPG “in a satirical post-apocalyptical world”, which encourages suggestions to be posted on their forum.
Version 0.9 has been released not long ago, which on the gameplay-side appears to mainly bring new models and audio. We have missed quite a few versions here on Free Gamer though. See the changelog for a complete list of versions and features.
As you can see in the video above, third party art assets were used. They were originally created for OpenDungeons and shared on OpenGameArt end of March 2012.
