Some Might Say

Want to simulate running your own college or university? You can. And it's open source. I post this purely out of amazement that somebody would program such a "game".

Perhaps a more relevant simulation game is, er, running your own game design company. GameBiz: The Magical Years and GameBiz 2 (download) provide such an experience, but only freeware and on Windows. Again, posted purely out of intrigue.

Back on to more, er, better-er things... version 0.3 of SuperTuxKart is imminent. :-)

There has been a spike in activity of late as the developers try to push out the next version, which now uses SDL instead of PLIB. There is an RC available for download (released quietly earlier in May) if you want to help test things. The main weakness of the game is now the quality of the tracks. Hopefully a new release will attract a few people interested in creating some good new tracks for the game. They also need help creating a Windows build for the next release.

CuteGod mockup

LostGarden, where the author is creating some lovely free graphics to encourage game programmers to create some free games, is issuing some challenges and outlines a basic game he wants to see somebody prototype, called CuteGod. The game design is an interesting read, drawing inspiration from Populus but having a character of it's own.

LostGarden ran a previous challenge called SpaceCute for which a few prototypes were already created. It's interesting to see an artist challenging programmers by proving both art and a game design. It's quite different to the usual approaches taken by designing open source games where usually the art is created for the game and not the other way around - here the game is created for the art. The advantages of this are clear goals and something that is tangible and looks good with only the basic code in place.