Saturday, August 02, 2008

Reading material

I finally managed to compile and play Be The Wumpus (using the CVS version). I had some trouble finding out how the controls work, but then found out that you don't turn in 90-degree steps and that you have to attack (space) to make the humans squeak in fear. I immediately started hunting down and consuming those two-legged pieces of meat.



I am amazed by how this game appeals to your hunting instincts. It's also a game which will give you a break from ruining your eyes, as keeping them closed while playing makes it easier (and more fun). Now I just have to wait untill it's night, so I can go hunting at full darkness!




Orbit-Hopper split-screen

I tried playing Orbit-Hopper, but it appears that my outdated GeForce 5200 isn't enough. Which is a shame, I'd love to try a pretty and improved version of Skyroads. And Orbit-Hopper is supposed to be just that. It even has split-screen support and a level editor and I imagine both might be impressive.



Bughunter2 and Tranberry are working on Burning Dust, which will become a 2D RTS engine and then a game, using Hard Vacuum graphics. There's also a game design/brain storm document in the works.



Project Alexandria is a 2D gravity arcade space shooter containing some plot. I find the gravity part somewhat hard, but the overall game rather entertaining.



Justinnichol's sci-fi art, fonts and drawings are available under the Creative Commons Attribution license.




PURITY

PURITY is a minimalistic ioq3-based shooter and looks very interesting to me [video]. I was unable to try it, as there are no GNU/Linux binaries and the required GTKRadiant is not easy to compile.



A very resourceful discussion on managing free game projects was started by Brendan on the Dungeon Hack forums.



He explains that the most important rules for a game developing community are:



It also appears that Anna Kournikova is the biggest enemy of volunteer game projects because she will start dating your best coder, making him unavailable for the project.



Since I have started giving reading recommendations: this blog will knock your socks off! It's a news blog for the being-developed, non-free* MMO game "love".



You will be either impressed by the fresh ideas or by how nifty the author introduces his views, so that you are tricked into thinking he is so right, which at the same time makes you love his game, as it's design follows his views.



*I'm talking about this kind of free by the way.

6 comments:

Vadim Peretokin said...

User support is a really big one too.

qubodup said...

ah, well I understood the "nice and friendly" as valid for users and devs..

JP said...

Hey, thanks for the writeup on Purity! Sorry it's not very easy to try out on Linux at the moment, without my full-on dev setup at least. I'll let you know when I have a better solution for that.

JP said...

I've posted an easier way to get Purity up and running on *nix in the forum thread. It's still at a pre-alpha level so don't expect anything amazing, but it's coming along.

Anonymous said...

I feel compelled to plug my favorite version of Hunt the Wumpus: Andrew Plotkin's "Hunter, in Darkness".

Game info at Baf's guide

Play it on Ifiction.org
Sadly, Ifiction's interpreter doesn't do the reverse text in the title sequence correctly. A minor hint: if you feel like making a map, you're doing it wrong. :)

Anonymous said...

Try tweaking the config file. I once played Orbit-Hopper with a Geforce4. Or maybe your libraries or drivers are outdated.

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