Hexoshi - inspired by Metroid

Hexoshi (forum thread) is a libre game generally inspired by the Metroid series, notably the older versions.

It is seeking funding using CrowdSupply for a budget of at least $1100 to achieve "Milestone 1" which involves fleshing out the first world of the game, including new enemies, player abilities, and 30-40 rooms, and the graphics for it all (which seems to be the bulk of the funding requirement).

Clearly this project has come a long way and looks better with every release! So grab your copy over at their fancy new website.

QuakeExpo2016 16-30th of July, register your virtual booth now!

Seem like some people want to revive the old QuakeExpo tradition this year, which is after all the 20th anniversary of Quake1:

https://qexpo2016.com/

Booth pre-registration started on the 18th of June, and the for those that wonder what it is all about:

If you are a qexpo old-timer:  The format is virtual ‘booths’ set up for a limited number of days just like the past.  But unlike the past, this site has a built-in comment and messaging system.  The site-wide stream of discussion is available on the ‘Activity’ tab.  However, any booth owner may disable comments on their particular booth page by checking the ‘Comments Disabled’ category.

We also have a fancy event calendar to be populated.  Events occurring prior to the Expo days may be posted, but it is requested that there be an event coverage booth, news, or other tie-in available during the Expo itself.

If you’re a new-timer wondering what the heck this is:  The Quake Expo concept is based on virtual ‘booths’ where people show off projects, provide tutorials, or share nostalgia.  See the links at the bottom of the site for previous years.  The idea is a bit retro given all the possible online outlets for creativity now.  But that’s one of the reasons to have it-  with so many islands of forums, social media groups, and code repositories, it might be nice to come together for a few days and see what everyone else is doing.  The time limitation is key.  Booths will only be open for two weeks and afterwards the entire site is closed and archived.

Focus is mainly on Quake1 engine derived projects (Darkplaces Engine for example), but in the past there were usually also a few Quake2/3 engine projects in it. Fully FOSS is not a strict requirement, but quite common, and the engine is of course GPL licensed.

Personally I hope we will see some projects picking up the quite awesome mobileVR port of Darkplaces: http://quakevr.com/ 

P.S.: Slightly OT, but the Inside3D forums (all about Quake1 engine programming) have a new home at http://www.insideqc.com/

Blackvoxel, an ambitious Minecraft/Factorio mix?

Check out this interesting (somewhat recently GPLv3 re-licensed) game Blackvoxel:



As you can see it has some interesting mechanic which they call "Molecular Voxel Interaction Engine". As seen in the trailer above, it basically allows you to automate crafting, resulting in interesting "programmable" factory setups.
Of course this might sound a bit too much like actual work and not fun... but given the big fan scene for the closed source game Factorio, I would say it can be more fun that it looks at first ;)

Blackvoxel itself probably needs to be a bit more of a game instead of "just" a sandbox, but there is big promise in the overall concept, so give it a try :)

Cute Character Crowdfunding (CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Remember Justin Nichol's amazing Portrait Kickstarter? He's up to no good again:

Horde of Cuteness! is an ongoing crowdfunded high resolution character icon collection and the indiegogo campaign will add 2 heroes, 5 monsters, and 3 boss monsters chosen by the backers.

All the characters will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 license, and will be made available as .pngs with transparent backgrounds, and will have include .kra or .xcf source files for editing the characters yourself. All new images will be 2000px by 2000px.

 There's a month left and only 590$ out of 1000$ missing.

Back the icon collection on indiegogo.

DevCorner: Atomic Game Engine MIT (Urho3D fork) and Godot 2.0

First off (and you probably read it elsewhere before): The awesome Godot game engine got a really awesome 2.0 release a few weeks ago. It also got independent of it's original developers (who stay active in development), and the first larger commercial game with it was released on Steam just a few days ago.

Fresh of the press is a FOSS release of an pretty awesome competitor though:
The Atomic Game Engine was just released fully under the MIT license! Its render engine is a fork of the pretty nice Urho3D renderer, but it includes an cross-platform integrated development environment similar to Godot:

Looks nice, but where is the Linux binary release? :(

Dive into the source code here. Similar to Godot it features some neat platform support: Linux, Android, WebGL, Windows, iOS and OSX (resorted for significance ;) ); but unlike it you have much more and more common scripting languages at your disposal: JavaScript, TypeScript, C++, and C# scripting in the works. Especially the latter could be interesting if someone manages to make an Unity3D compatibility layer for migrating and open-sourcing Unity games...

For a nice overview, don't miss the GamesFromScratch video and introduction tutorial (from back in December 2015 when it was not yet MIT licensed):

DevCorner: Superpowers HTML5 collaborative game maker open-sourced!

Great news for HTML5 game developers: a few days ago Superpowers was released under the ISC license.

What is Superpowers? A game development platform (an integrated editor but you can collaborate in realtime online; how cool is that! :D ) for making HTML5 games using TypeScript (a superset of Javascript). But you will also be able to work with other languages, so far support for the well known LÖVE2D is available.

Learn more in this video:


The source is available here and there is also an repository with a few sample games. If you like what they are doing, please consider becoming a supporter.

Looking forward to your new HTML5 games!

Best Open Source Top-Down Space Shooter : Super Space Invader

Lasers, rockets, shields, health regeneration, pixels. You know. The good stuff. Just nicely packaged with levels of just the right duration and hardness, persistent upgrades, shaders, reverb...

Two buttons are enough to play, since that was one of the themes of Ludum Dare #34, in which the game came #74 among 1638 jam entries.

Super Space Invader Review

Supser Space Invader was made with LÖVE (v0.9) and thus runs on Linux, OS X, Windows.

The source is available on GitHub under zlib/libpng.