Traction Edge: Squad-Based Tactics, Roguelike Interface

Traction Edge is a story driven, turn based strategy game set in a Steampunk Victorian England. Gameplay is similar to the Gollop Brothers UFO or Lasersquad series in that you have "Action Points" to spend during your turn. The game also borrows heavily from roguelikes in both look and feel.

Traction Edge is currently under development and is considered alpha software. It is playable but limited. v0.2 was released for the Annual Roguelike Release Party 2011. It is distributed as source only and requires SFML 1.6 (not 2.0) and cmake to build.

Current Features:

• Turn based gameplay
• 2-4 member squad teams
• Destructable terrain
• Victorian Steampunk setting
• SFML based, rescalable on the fly, 16x16 graphical tiles.

Planned Features:

• 16-20 static levels with full story arc
• Random content, procedural maps
• Procedural tech tree
• Civilians
• Z-levels

You can keep track of all development activity using this feed. The Linux distro that I use doesn't support SFM 1.6 any more, which makes me unable to test this interesting sounding and looking squad tactics game.

[Read More...]

Winter Shorts 3: Wizznic Cursor, TORCS Music, Knights Deathmatch, Humm and Strumm Specs, SuperTux Contest

Wizznic! received more GUI enhancements [video (00:57@YouTube)]
TORCS 1.3.2 brings menu music into the game [.ogg (05:50/7.1MB)]
Knights 0.19 features deathmatch [description]
Humm and Strumm is an in-dev co-op game engine [design .pdf (156kB)]

SuperTux' level contest has four entries so far [submission thread]

[Read More...]

Summer Shorts 2 + Screens

Unknown Horizons Player Scores...

gscai of the real-time colony building simulation Unknown horizons wrote a short player-view summary of how the game's artificial intelligence works.

libtcod's project browser filter

libtcod, an advanced toolkit for roguelikes now has an online browser for projects using it that allows to apply filters.

Tactical battle in Hale

I stumbled over Hale, an RPG described as having "deep tactical combat system and storyline".

The project seems to use freely licensed assets, which is a great. I hope that the GUI will receive a makeover (using a pastel background color and killing the 1995'ish 3d button/border look does wonders).

Example sound visualization at Freesound 2.0

Freesound went 2.0! CC-BY and CC0 as license options! (Unfortunately CC-BY-NC as well). Sampling+ remains for legacy sounds where authors have not switched to a modern license. Read the announcement here.

Six-legged vehicle in Xonotic

Xonotic 0.5 brings new maps, vehicles and multi-language support. Many more details can be found in their annoucnement post.

[Read More...]