Gaming Zone

A 15 minutes long video profile of Stephen Cameron was published on YouTube by Jack Younger - hacker (presumed) at TX/RX Labs.

The video includes an interview of Cameron's about his latest project Space Nerds in Space including inspiration and actual authentic gameplay video footage of the crew (highlights at 08:30).

Some of Word War Vi's history also is covered in the video (4:00).

Do I need to spell it out? Press that like button if you can! :)

Source: Announcement on the FreeGameDev forums

This is a guest post by Julien Jorge, developer, artist and musician behind the open source indie games Plee the Bear and Andy's Super Great Park, here to present the fundraising campaign he launched for the former.

The prototypes of the game have always been released for Windows and Linux as free software, available under the terms of the GNU GPL and the CC by-sa licenses. The latest version contains three levels of the storyline and four mini-games; and has already generated very positive criticisms (e.g. on The Linux Game Tome). Players loved the fun, the graphics and the music; other indie developers were pleasantly surprised by the technical skills and the details of the game; and people in the free software movement appreciated the overall process and the quality of the resources, remarkable for a free game.

All these feedbacks motivated us to complete the game and to launch a fundraising campaign to help the development. The campaign is organized in order to implement the new contents of the game one after the other, each time with a new fundraiser. So, for the initial one, the feature you are welcome to support is a complete refresh of the existing work. You can see the details on the project's page on OpenFunding but let me show you how the game will look:


To be compared with the current release:


The animations will also be reworked. For example, here is a comparison of the changes in the animation of Plee walking. The old version is on the bright stripes, the new one is in the black stripes:


If you are a game developer, you may have already used some free resources from websites like OpenGameArt.org or Freesound.org. If you are a gamer, you may have played games using the resources of such websites. In both cases, you are certainly interested by our process consisting of releasing each part of the game under a free license. Actually, we have recently started to supply OpenGameArt.org with our assets.

So, if you like our project:

• give us some money for the next development steps,
• give us feedback about the process to help us improving it,
• share this announcement with your neighbors.

This way, we will all go toward a fun and good game :)

There were some game development related events at Flock Fedora Contributor Conference, August 2013 in lovely Charleston, SC, US.

So far my contributions to Fedora were merely a few wiki edits but my conference proposals were well-received.


I ended up speaking about making games using free art and leading a Trigger Rally level building workshop (video).



At the conference, I learned about Fedora's badge program and that it is connected to Mozilla Open Badges.


Another discovery: Lemonade Stand, which is an educational game developed by people from FOSS@RIT, who work on bringing Mozilla Open Badges to the OLPC.

Game development appears to be getting more and more of a foot in the door at free software conferences, so I encourage people working on open games to apply as speakers at conferences, talking about technical and social aspects of free, open source game development project leadership and contribution. (Not just at FOSS events, why not at general game dev events as well?)

If you have any relevant talks from recent events to point out, please do so in the comments!