Open Source RPGs coming up: Dawn RPG, OSARE, FreeDink, Hero of Allacrost, FoI

The future FOSS Diablo-and-more-like Open Source Action RPG Engine has an art style which I can approve of. (I do not approve of the Diablo-and-more-like FreeDroid RPG's art style.)

OSARE will be close to feature complete in Fall 2010.

I assume this means that it will be a working action rpg engine with enemies, items and skills, but no plot or story, ready to be turned into a game.

If you feel that you can contribute something matching high quality of this project, check out the tasks page!

Dawn has very nice graphics and a decent demo with items, a fetch quest, enemies and spells. It's hard to beat -- but easy to exploit, due to pathfinding/collision fun stuffs.

Communication seems to work via mailing lists.

There's a little list of things I don't like:

1. Slow walking speed (needs a run button)
2. Huge sprite masks/collision boxes
3. Two very Zelda™/Link®-like looking sprites..

Hero of Allacrost's release policy experiments result to a release early, release often philosophy.

There is a HoA subforum which is visible only to registered users, for discussion of the game's design. I find it irritating that a large part of discussions is hidden from non-registered lurkers, when it might attract participation. I wonder what other's think about such practice, which has also found its place in the DungeonHack project in this subforum, which is used for discussing a mini-plot/'module' called "Spider Forest". Please comment your experiences with partially hiding game dev discussions if you have any.

HoA also has forums that are developer-only, which feels very non-open to me (because it isn't :) ) but on the other hand the project is supposed to be 'closed' in the sense of 'dedicated developers instead of casual contributors'. What do you think about having part of the development hidden unless you 'promise' to become a dedicated developer?

Funnily enough, there are many projects which have 'closed' communication due to the simple fact that there are many users and developers who don't want to use mailing lists (in my opinion they are usually not usable for browsing, google groups should be acceptable for people used to forums, but GNU mailman is horrible in its default state, if you want to have an overview over existing threads.)

Fall of Imiryn: Hardly anything new about it. A few tweaks there and here in the svn.. If someone wants to test this, I'm looking into polishing the game so it can be 'finished' via a 'last' release. It is playable from start to end right now, but might be enhanced with a few content, without breaking any backs or endlessly continuing development. :) (suggestions welcome)

The ..weird.. crazy action-RPG Dink Smallwood was released as open source (minus sounds and music) and is being developed as FreeDink.

I will try to spend some time for adding sfx to FreeDink - haven't started yet, even though I have quite the plan. I will use a github repository. Of course anybody is welcome to join in and there's probably nobody working on looking for music to add to FreeDink.

Hopefully there will be a 'full' release without missing audio soon.

Let's have a little rant, shall we? X.org (the thing that makes Linux have graphics) often crashes, when a game force-fullscreens on me. This makes a sad qubodup D:. I wish games would have a 'select your video/audio configuration' window before game start or just start in windowed mode. :)

Category: allacrost, dawn, foi, freedink, osare