Monday, August 10, 2015

Mini Sci-Fi Open Source Tower Defense Game

Purely by chance, I found an obviously abandoned but still fun to play mini tower defense with a skippable tutorial level and two playable missions, beautiful graphics and performance settings.

To be a master is to spam en mass

So you place towers and the shoot enemies that move towards your base. I know this! Being an impatient player type, I skipped past the tutorial and was annihilated in level 1.

Short enough messages in a hard enough tutorial level

The degree of my destruction was such, that I was thankful for the tutorial being there at all. Even though I did die in it, it taught me enough about the all-or-nothing early game (which some might refer as to "unbalanced") to get my strategy right.

Turn off for speed. Turn on for awesome!

You get 3 towers: that allows you to build more tower, one that allows you to shoot more and one that shoots. You can block paths and create mazes. There are no tower upgrades and that's okay.

All the plot. Space to continue. Take that non-skip-able intro video AAA games!

Mission #3 is not possible to win (prove me wrong) but it was a great experience to find that I was able to beat the tutorial mission after all. By deviating from the given instructions! If that's not freedom (besides being open source) then I don't know what is!

Yeah right...

Come to think of it, the ridiculousness of level 3 practically speaks "dear player, you should totally fork and make new levels!"

Made with love2d

The last commit to Turres Monacorum was in May 2014 and the game was made at a game jam. My experience dictates that this won't be picked up by the original developers any more but to any player with love2d installed, it will come as a wonderful, visually polished snack!

Download the mini tower defense game from the github release page and enjoy!

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Limit Load, new arcade combat flight simulator

Stealth development might not be very "open-sourceish", but it sometimes makes for some nice surprises in our project showcase forum.

This time it was the completely new open-source game Limit Load, self described as:
A cockpit flight game that is more of an arcade than a sim. The game is built on the Panda3D game engine. It is similar to the ancient games like the classic Wings or the very good Strike Commander. The story and the atmosphere are important elements of the game, so a lot of focus is placed on that too.
Here is some in-game action and it seems quite polished already for such a new game:


Licensing of assets is still a bit of a grey area it seems, but they are fully aware of it:
The game code is licensed under GPL 3, and custom-made game assets under CC-by-SA 4.0. Some of the assets were taken from "free" (as in "not sure in which way") sources on the Internet, so their licensing situation is unclear. Eventually these should be cleared for use or replaced.
So where is my VR kit? :D

Thursday, May 7, 2015

Old school 2D RTS Wyrmsun is looking to be greenlit

We were kindly made aware by the main developer of the 2D RTS Wyrmsun that he is currently looking for support to get this game on the Steam platform (link includes a game-play video).

Here is a description of the game we got from him:
In Wyrmsun, humans, elves and dwarves all seek to carve a place for themselves on their different homeworlds, with humans living on Earth, dwarves dwelling on Nidavellir, and elves inhabiting Alfheim. In the game's missions, each world follows separate storylines, but the various civilizations can be mixed and matched in custom games.

Wyrmsun features:
  • Retro-style graphics
  • 2 playable civilizations, and a number of non-playable ones
  • 18 quests to play, earning technology points which can be used to obtain new units, buildings and technologies
  • 38 units, 30 buildings and 14 technologies
  • Units that can earn experience, being able to upgrade to new unit types or acquire new abilities upon level-up
  • Persistent heroes, who carry over their level and abilities throughout scenarios
  • Personal names and traits for units
  • Cave, Conifer Forest, Dungeon, Fairlimbed Forest and Swamp tilesets
  • 33 maps of real and fictional locations to choose from, as well as random maps
  • Living environment, with fauna reproduction and predation
  • Very moddable game, with mod-loading capability built in
  • Grand strategy mode, where production is resolved on the strategic (world map) level, while battles are resolved on the tactical level
  • In-game encyclopedia, allowing players to learn more about the units, buildings and other elements of the game, as well as their historical and mythological sources of inspiration.
For those more inclined to help out with the code, there are two code repositories: one for the game and one for the modified Stratagus engine.

P.S.: Yes FOSS games can be on Steam as long as they don't integrate with closed source steam integration libraries; And it can be a great way to attract more users to your game and maybe even collect some donations or sell add-ons (preferably in a "release freely when sufficient funds are gathered" style). See this game for an successful example.