Home » Posts filed under genre-puzzle
Posted by
Onote on Tuesday, April 9, 2013
Bushido Blocks is a puzzle game for Android under GPL license, inspired by block-bashing games such as Bejeweled, Diamond Dash and Tap Blox.
Bushido Blocks Screenshots
Tap matches of three or more blocks to slice them with your katana. The more blocks you can slice in one go, the more time you gain on the clock. Special blocks eliminate whole rows of blocks but don't give you any extra time, so use them wisely.
Links:
Code License: GPL
Content License: Unknown
Posted by
Onote on Monday, April 8, 2013
Retro and art-game fans will love this.
2x0ng is a challenging action/puzzle game with procedurally generated levels. It is pronounced "TWO-zong", and is the sequel to David O'Toole's 2009 PC puzzler Xong.
2x0ng framebuffer examples
At its core, this game is a mashup. 2x0ng's design is a nonlinear combination of several different late 70s/early 80s home video games, combining related aspects of each into something new. In 2x0ng, you move a guy around the screen and shoot at enemies in all directions, as in Berzerk. The ball you throw ricochets and comes back to you, like in Tron Deadly Discs. You break colored bricks with the ball, like in Breakout. You transfer colors from one place to another in order to complete the level, similar to Revenge Of The Beefsteak Tomatoes.
To reach the next level, you must successively unlock new areas by opening color-coded gates in the correct order. The levels are procedurally generated, so the game experience is different each time. Later levels are much larger than the screen, and feature substantially more moving/colliding objects than would have been possible in a real home video game from that era.
Downloads:
More links:
Code License: GPLv3
Content License: CC-BY-SA 3.0
Posted by
Onote on Tuesday, February 26, 2013
PyWeek #16 in April
PyWeek logo
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.
PyWeek #15 Entry: Rainbow Rooms
Rainbow Rooms is a physical-nonsense-maze puzzle game based on
libtcod.
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.
Code License:
GPLv2Content License:
Various (
DFSG approved)
Posted by
Onote on Monday, October 29, 2012
Force: Leashed is a free first person gravity fiddler. To advance, you need to guide rockets to their targets using spherical potential fields. And no, it's not like Portal. That much.
Force: Leashed was started as one of the 2012
7DFPS prototypes. It is based on GPL-licensed
Darkplaces which for example also powers
Xonotic.
Force: Leashed is available for free download for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows from its
website.
The art asset license status is unknown. Watch
this tweet for further information.
Posted by
Onote on Thursday, July 5, 2012
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.
Posted by
Onote on Thursday, June 7, 2012
 |
| Wizznic! cursor-driven level editor WIP |
Keyboard, mouse and touchscreens control the prettier-than-ever, polished retro puzzle
Wizznic!, which is 100% GPLv3 and available as a
GitHub project.
- Last release (0.9.9): ~six months ago.
- Last commit: one day ago.
A recent progress update post reveals the goals for and the path to 1.0:
Before Wizznic 1.0 we will create two completely new themes, each for it's own pack, thus, two completely new packs! That is 40 new puzzles, leaving the mainline puzzle set at 80 puzzles.
However, before doing that, we will sit down and play through the entire game, this should allow us to come up with some really evil puzzles for the later levels ;)
Anyway, just wanted to say, in this in-browser, Object Oriented, Accelerated, flashy, highres, 3D world, that little pixel pushing Wizznic is not dead!
Posted by
Onote on Thursday, May 24, 2012
 |
| image: Node Reviver main screen |
Game development jams bring many lines of usually dirty code that power often innovative new implementations of various mechanics and rules.
Ludum Dare requires source to be visible but neither code nor art has to be freely licensed.
I believe that the histories of TuxKart/SuperTuxKart, Warzone 2100 and OpenArena show that maintenance can be one of the strengths of the open source game development scene. Having more gamejam-made working prototypes available under "safe"
free licenses would enable this community to pick up promising projects and slowly build upon them.
Anyways, one of the games that has more than proper licensing information and is both free, open source code and art is Node Reviver. A short description:
- Game mechanics and level designs intersecting with Pac-Man's PipeWalker's.
- Light neon colors on black background visuals.
- Bfxr sound effects (with sound sources included, nice!)
Links:
Posted by
Onote on Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Building bridges in OpenGOO
You may remember that in the
first Humble Indie Bundle, World of Goo was
not open-sourced. Well, there is an active open source clone called
OpenGOO being developed. It uses OpenGL, Box2D and is GPLv3-licensed.
 |
| Basic layers of level creation in OpenGOO |
 |
| A Shotgun Debugger level viewed in Inkscape |
There are
instructions available for creating levels. Inkscape is used for that purpose, just like in
Shotgun Debugger! A method I would love to see being widely used in games that allow for user-generated content in general.
 |
| SuperTuxKart level editor (hint: it's Blender!) |
Speaking of not-re-inventing-wheels: the team behind SuperTuxKart recently posted
an article about using Blender as a level editor, rather than writing and maintaining an own content creation tool, which I highly recommend to all developers of 3D games with 'traditional' engines.
Posted by
Onote on Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Frozen Bubble for Android
2012 February the 6th was the 10th birthday of
Frozen Bubble's first release. The development was started in november 2001 by "ayo", amaury and Guillaume Cottenceau, members of the MandrakeSoft team (Mandriva nowadays).
Frozen Bubble is a beautiful game inspired by Puzzle Bobble (published by Taito in 1994 , also called Bust-a-Move). The game has nice graphics and music (from matths alias Matthias).
Frozen Bubble level editor for Android
Development has stopped in 2008, but Frozen Bubble and its ports still enjoy high popularity, especially on the Linux and
Android platforms. A
Java port also exists. Only the first version is
available for Windows.
A French language interview with the makers was recently
published on linuxfr.org.
Posted by
Onote on Sunday, February 5, 2012
Please bear with me for the duration of this post.
Медвед
BearGame игра про медведя прыгуящим на воздушных шарах. Актуальная альфа-версия была написана в Java.
Plee le Porter
BearGame n'est pas le seul jeu avec un ours. Par exemple,
Plee The Bear est un jeu avec un ours comme personnage principal.
Neues Pac-Bär Logo
Des weiteren habe ich letztens das Logo für eine Berliner Hobbyspielentwicklergruppe namens
Berlin Mini Jam überarbeitet. Dies hat nicht direkt was mit open source Spielen zu tun, aber einige von uns mögen die offene Soße und stellen unsere Spiele unter freien Lizenzen zur verfügung.
Thanks for Bearing!
Posted by
Onote on Sunday, January 29, 2012
A somewhat neglected topic here on FreeGamer are classic puzzle games, and
OGS Mahjong is definitely one of the gems of this genre:
The stable 0.9 release of this game can be expected shortly, so brush up your Mahjong skills or take the opportunity to finally learn the rules of
this age-old classic (like me).
Posted by
Onote on Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Posted by
Onote on Sunday, January 8, 2012
Wizznic!
Wizznic! supports mouse & touchscreen. [
Video] Code available on
GitHub.
MeAndMyShadow
MeAndMyShadow
0.2rc1 is out. It features tutorial, in-game help, a new default visual style and an improved editor.
Epiar 0.5.0 has been released:
- UI clean-up
- Expanded missions system
- Sound and music additions
- Main menu
- Editor greatly expanded
- Misc. bug fixes
GemRB logo
GemRB 0.7.0 was released recently. Their wiki received a clean-up as well. The engine re-implementation runs on Android and iOS. BG, TotSC, BGII, ToB, IWD and HoW can be played start to end. Some features are
missing and there are some
new features too.
Posted by
Onote on Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Bits & Bots: controlling two robots at once
Bits & Bots is a real-time puzzle game about figuring out the codes to moving robots around and get them to their targets most efficiently. It comes with binaries for 32/64bit Linux and Windows. Gpl code, by-sa art.
Goblin Camp 0.2, probably running some fancy tileset
- Piles replace Stockpiles. Everything is allowed and containers get automatically shuffled to where they are needed.
- Diseases will weaken and eventually kill your population if you don’t do anything about a growing population.
- Migratory animals will sometimes cross the map
- The spawning pool expands and spreads corruption in a smoother way, it’s improved from the abrupt way it was before.
- Cowardly creatures can now also panic if they encounter another panicking creature
- Death messages have been improved to give a bit more information, and a bit of variety has been added to them as well.
- Constructions strobe under the cursor now, to better visualize where one stops and another one begins.
- Portable mode. Just create a file named goblin-camp.portable in the directory where GC is installed and it’ll store all the files it needs in a sub-directory in that folder, instead of in the operating system’s default folder.
- Skeletons no longer bleed and other assorted bug fixes.
BASE Pro is a Windows-only base jumping simulation game. Its community and news can be found on
this forum.
Community member LedInfrared got the hang out of gameplay video recording and shared videos of STK and Xonotic on
this YouTube page, including download links to original video material!
Stuart Buchanan: FlightGear contributor
FlightGear's news section has seen quite a high activity lately, including three interviews:
Posted by
Onote on Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Search for Smodrick 1.3.1, a simple ncurses-based game, was recently uploaded to SourceForge.
 |
| Nearly dead in Search for Smodrick 1.3.1 |
The gameplay consists of finding an optimal path to get to the next level and avoiding/deflecting enemy androids. Game turns appear to be mixed-real/turn-based
 |
| No monsters yet in this match of Black Obelisk 0.2 |
I was reminded of the JavaScript game
Black Obelisk by
Starinfidel, in which your task is to destroy hidden obelisks while avoiding or luring deadly monsters. Hint: input is via mouse and you start playing by pressing black tiles next to non-black tiles.
Both games are single-player puzzles with minimal visuals.
Posted by
Onote on Sunday, November 6, 2011
Phlipple
Phlipple is an original puzzle game which could be useful for training thinking in 3D.
It's available for Linux and Windows with 50 levels and there is a 100-level version for Android (EUR 1.70 / USD 2.30) and iOS (was it taken down? License drama senses tingling!).
I don't know anything about the availability/license of the build instructions/scripts for the portable platforms and of the additional level files but assume they are closed.
Phlipple is by Remigiusz 'mal1ce' Dybka, who also made Zaz (including a [proprietary?] version for Android).
Posted by
Onote on Friday, October 14, 2011
No screenshot of Pingus 0.7.4
Version
0.7.4 of
Pingus introduces an array of changes:
Content:
- New levelsets, "Desert" and "Factory Campaign" (27 new levels in total)
- This is the first use of the desert and factory graphics in official levels
Gameplay:
- Deadly fall height increased
- Digger/Miner/Basher paths cleanup
Features:
- Demo recordings/playback re-implemented (32bit/64bit not compatible)
- --usedir parameter added (useful for portable play)
- Unicode support added
- Option menu added
Usability:
- Window can be resized in-game
- Soundcard dependancy removed
- Man page added
Look:
- Level dimensions now suit 1920x1200 resolution
- Anti-aliasing added to bitmap fonts
Performance:
- Software rendering improved
- OpenGL rendering option added
Other:
Good Old Colorful M.A.R.S. (0.7.4)
0.7.3 and then
0.7.4 of M.A.R.S. were relesed:
- New speacial
- New weapon
- Dutch, Mongolian and Norwegian languages added
- In-game speed settings
Posted by
Onote on Saturday, October 1, 2011
"Summer?" you ask? Well.. I'ts warm in Berlin.*
Also a warning: this article is 80% development, 31.5% art and 18% games.
Cross-language forums so far
FreeGameDev Forums now have Spanish and Swedish/Danish/Norwegian subforums. Should we add some more? Read
this then write
here.
OpenClonk old and new terrain rendering
The 2.0
OpenClonk release brings higher resolution for the terrain, which makes the game look a lot better. Read the full changelog
here.
Check out the
Blendswap Military Vehicles Contest entries:
I'm amazed. But that's just me. I have a thing for mechs.
Alot even.
WebGL lessons. Freely licensed too.
Did anybody know of these CC-BY-SA-licensed
WebGL tutorials?
This dog told me about them.
"Hacking" 8-hour prototypes: Hubwar and Nodehack
* Speaking of Berlin, Germany.
There was a little game dev jam in Berlin . Two of the prototypes are open source! (
Hubwar and
Nodehack)
Posted by
Onote on Monday, September 26, 2011
GJID's first level
I have a hard time playing puzzle games when their only reward is getting to the next one. Consequently I'm usually not a fan of Sokoban games. Having a little or a lot of story bundled with the puzzle helps though.
In
GJID you control a brave robot of the name GJID, who volunteered to recycle dangerous weapons from a cold war. In 14 levels you have to dispose of nuclear and disruptor weapons.
Movement controls reacts instantly and you are allowed to skip levels. There is no save function and no sound. The game runs in full-screen but thankfully does not resize the screen and scales instead. License: MIT
This version seems to be made for *nix only.
./configure && make allows to easily run the game.
From the README:
This is a clone of the eponymous DOS shareware game written in 92 by John Remyn. I spoke with John in 95, when the first version of this clone was made. He admired the 8-bit graphics (original game was done in 4-color CGA) and did not object to its existence. His email address has since expired and the few contact attempts I've made recently hit dead ends. The DOS game was $10 shareware and I include the original registration form in the README, in case you want to track John down and give him money for the excellent level design that make this game what it is.
Aside from being an entertaining puzzle, I also release this game as an example of using the XCB library for making X applications. XCB is the new lightweight replacement for Xlib that suffers from lack of documentation. This game demonstrates how to create small applications with it and also how to use RENDER for drawing text, tile sprites, and for hardware scaling of the 320x240 backbuffer.
GJID reminds me of another, even more story-driven Sokoban-style game with simple graphics:
The Villany of Cat Food Inc.
Posted by
Onote on Saturday, August 6, 2011
The first beta release of
Cubosphere is available.
The game reminds of
irrlamb and
Neverball but is in fact a tile-based puzzle, rather than a free-physics/precision game. It has a simple level editor and 18 visual/audible styles to chose from. Some features of the 200+ levels are lasers, frying blocks, teleporters, switches, elevators and enemies.
