Thanks to Mozilla, the Liberated Pixel Cup got a huge donation, but we’re still about 800 dlls short of the goal, and the deadline’s this Friday. So go ahead, and donate if you haven’t already.

If you’d like a small glimpse of the Sprites that are already being worked on, Lunpa made a small, interactive web demo using naked male and female sprites, as well as some bats, butterflies, houses and other tiles that will be used.

This is only one sample though, there’s going to be many games and many more sprites made for the contest, but I hope that the demo’s enough to get you to chip in for the contest.

One of the tasks I had to do in $DAYJOB consisted in displaying a Map of Mexico and being able to highlight each state on mouseover using HTML to do it.

Of course, there’s a dozen or so Online Image Mapping tools, but they require you click every single point of the state, and unlike USA whose states are often squares or very basic shapes, Mexico has none of that. It’s all weird and squiggly lines.

To solve this issue, I found this brilliant Gimp plugin. All I had to do is select the state by selecting by color, saving it to a channel and exporting it. The result, if I may say so, is pretty darned good. If you have issues with the color selection tool, remember you can tweak the treshold values for the color selection, so that it selects more or less similar colors to the one you chose.

I decided to license the file as Apache License 2.0, and the code’s available at Github for forking. I hope this’ll help fellow Mexicans, as I found absolutely no usable Maps of Mexico for HTML that worked in the crappiest of browsers (Internet Explorer) and didn’t require Flash.

If you’d like to make your own map, the Gimp HTML Img Map plugin page has an excellent tutorial, my recommendation when exporting this, however, is to set the treshold for smoothing to 0.

This is huge! Mozilla just announced themselves as an LPC Sponsor!

The contest itself won’t change, it’s goal is still to make Free Software Games and Creative Common Content, and HTML5 was always a supported platform. The difference, however, is that there’ll now be a separate section for HTML5 games, as well as some coaching and guidance from Mozilla regarding Web Game Development.

Thank you, Mozilla, for stepping forward and helping make Free Software Linux Games.

I had a friend post one of them Facebook Statuses bragging that he was downloading the “Creative Suite 6″. I decided to share the Creative Suite 6 for everyone that’s interested:

• GIMP.  Windows, Mac, Linux
• Inkscape. Windows, Mac, Linux
• Blender. Windows, Mac, Linux
• TuxPaint. Windows, Mac, Linux
• Tiled Map Editor. Windows, Mac, Linux Deb, Linux RPM(32bit), Linux RPM(64bit), Linux SRPM.
• PiTiVi . Windows, Mac, Linux

That’s right. Six Creative Programs in One Single Package. A Suite, if you will. You’re welcome.

It’s all over the news. Steam for Linux is real and not another cruel April Fools prank. The gamer inside me is extremely excited about this, and after re-reading Phoronix’ article a dozen times, about how Gabe Newell is now a Linux Evangelist, it makes sense. If you believe the rumors, anyway.

From Phoronix, they’ve got Steam working on Ubuntu, as well as Left 4 Dead 2. I’m pretty sure they’ll release Steam for Linux in some sort of Beta fashion for Linux Gamers to iron out all the kinks, but once they feel confident, I think they’d move on to the next phase…

Rumors surfaced recently about Valve’s newfound interest for Hardware, and Valve making “SteamBox”, a dedicated console to play Steam Games, were mostly marked as ridiculous.

If Valve shipped “Valve Linux”? They’d probably bundle it up with propietary GPU drivers from NVidia and/or ATI to get a better bang from the GPU. They’d probably use a modified / custom UI. Sort of like MythTV, but for Steam Games.

Once they have the Distro, they’d need to come up with some hardware and sell it. I’m not saying it’d be easy for Valve to sell Steamboxes on Walmarts and Gamestops all over the world, but hey, we’re talking conspiracy rumors here.

And between Desura and Steam both appearing on Linux, I think it’s fairly safe to say that 2013 will finally be… The Year of the Linux Desktop.

A badly gimped image speaks a bajillion words….

I know all I’ve been writing about recently is about the Liberated Pixel Cup but I’m really, really excited for the contest. This’ll all be over soon.

While I’ll be writing specifically about the LPC, these tips should be useful for any game maker…

The first thing you need to do is pick out a genre (or genres) you’d like to use and think you can pull off within the allotted time. Once you’ve got that, pick a game engine that’s written in a programming language you are already familiar with:

Python gamers can use pygame, Java devs can stick with lwjgl, C/C++ devs can use Allegro, to name a few of the already available game engines that can help get the job done quicker.

Now, depending on your genre, there’s a number of things you can do between now and the day you actually start coding (July 1st for the LPC).

Storyboard

Unless you’re writing a Yet Another Tetris Clone, your game needs a story. You should write out how you’d introduce the gamer to your game, from the Title Screen, Intro/Outro, the events that happen within the story, how he defeats up the Villains, saves the Princesses and the credits roll.

Detail everything as much as you can. Write the dialogue that the NPCs might speak, or think of alternate paths the player might take.

Prototyping

You never get things right the first time. Specially if its your first time. The best way to get some advantage over fellow competitors is to start early, and start prototyping. Make a few maps of the places where the player might visit. Draft the Overworld map, complete with castles and caves. Make mockups of the UI, the Battle screen, the Item screen and any other screens the player might see.

Plan the Content

You can actually request some things be made during the June contest, but in the event that the one important feature you wanted isn’t made, scour the Interwebs for content that’s Freely-licensed (Creative Commons, yo!) and you can use in your game. Tiles, Sprites, Enemies, Animations, Music.
You never know what you’ll be missing. As a note, you won’t get points for using content that wasn’t submitted for the Cup, but it’s best to be ready.

Play with the Engine!

Before the contest starts, It’s a good idea to start looking at the engine, and the libraries you might use. Think of all the features you’d like the game to have, like networking support, sound, gamepad support or displaying ogv videos on screen. Now look up libraries that can help you accomplish these, and start playing with them. Read the documentation on how to use these libraries, start a sample project or three. Screw up, try again, and document your efforts. You’ll be glad you did.

Have a reasonable goal

The LPC contest will last a month, for the coding part. I know you’d love to build a 60 hour RPG epic where the Plumber saves the Princess from the evil dinosaur, but be reasonable: You’ll have to debug that 60 hour content, and who knows if you’ll hold The Judges attention for 60 hours. Scale down the efforts and concentrate on making your main features shine. That secret minigame that you hid inside the pub if you press the Konami code? It probably won’t be found by the judges, so you might as well not add it.

Over all… Have Fun!

It’s a friendly competition among game devs. You’re welcome to join the conversation at #LiberatedPixelCup on Freenode, where some of us are already discussing what sorts of games we’ll be building for the contest.

By August, we’ll be playing at least a dozen new games, so in the end, it doesn’t matter who takes the cup, at least we’ll have all sorts of GPL’d Games we can all play and modify!

With the Liberated Pixel Cup coming soon, I’ve begun brainstorming the kinds of features that I’d like my game to have… One thing led to another, and I begun brainstorming about making a system similar to Microsoft’s “Achievements” or Sony’s “Trophies”, but for Free Software and it’s gamers.

And thus, the idea of a Libre Gamer Network begun, and with the input of several friends and other LPC contestants, we came up with 2 pressing needs:

• It has to be federated, so that anyone can make his own network and drag his gamerscore.
• It has to work with lots of languages, like Java, C++ and Python
• There’s 3 components to this: A Client, a Server and a WebUI.

I’d love to work on this kind of project, but while I’ve worked on games and websites, I’ve never actually worked on an API at this level, and would appreciate any and all ideas and help that I can get.

The needs we’ve established are:

• A list of games, with their OSI-Approved license, and a link to each game.
• A list of achievements per game, it’s icon, description and value (As well as marking some as secret).
• A list of score boards (For high scores!).
• A Friends List
• A list of games played by a player
• Options to remove some games or achievements from the player (The player should always be in control of his data)

We’ve thought about this long and hard, and I believe there’s no way to actually secure such a system against cheaters, so before you ask, this would have absolutely no built-in system against cheaters.
It would simply be a peer-based system, where each Player can compare himself to his friends.

Any Game-Devs out there want to voice their opinion? Would you be interesting in implementing this on a game? What features would you like? How would it be best handled?

–
Nushio

I haven’t been so excited about a Contest since my first Science Fair back in Elementary School…

The Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons and Open Game Art have announced….

The Liberated Pixel Cup!

The contest itself is divided in Two Parts:

The first part will have Artists make Sprites and Music throughout the month of June, with prizes being given out to the best Artists / Sprites. The art itself has to be CC-By-SA and GPLv3 to participate, and the actual style guidelines will be published on June 1st.

The second one will have Game Devs make Libre Games (That is, Licensed GPLv3) during July, using those Sprites and Music, using any programming language you want, as long as it runs on a 100% Libre Environment, which probably means Fedora or Debian. This means no Flash or Silverlight, .NET or even Oracle’s Java, but Gnash, Moonlight, Mono and OpenJDK are allowed. Your game can also run on any other platform, but it has to run on a GNU / Linux one at least.

The Rules and The FAQ are in their site, and they’re actively working on clarifying some of the points in the contest, so if you have a question, hop on #LiberatedPixelCup on Freenode’s IRC.

I intend to participate in the Contest, so I’ll keep the details of my entry to myself for the time being

Game on!

I’ve been using Github for quite a while, but yesterday I actually learned how to use it.

See… I’ve been working on a Patch for CyanogenMod 9 that will add several features to the Phone App. Features I really like and were part of CyanogenMod 7…

However one of the things I had to do was write each line of code’s author, which wouldn’t be a big issue, except that I included 18 language translations, and hunting down each translation via github’s Commit History was going to be a pain….

But then I learned, thanks to jcsullins on Freenode, that there’s this awesome “Blame” button, which I had seen a million times but never pressed. The Blame button shows you line by line, which commit/author made it possible. This allowed me to trace the translation authors down to their actual commit.

The issue I had then, was that Github super-flavored the actual git patch. A quick Google-search taught me that adding “.patch” to the end of a github commit url would display the actual patch in plaintext.

So it took me a while, but I managed to gather every author of every line of code and translation (And I hope I didn’t miss any), but thanks to Git’s advanced features and Github’s awesome UI, I got it done and it was easier than I had thought.

Thanks Git, Github!

Now, to rewrite the functions so they comply with CyanogenMod’s standards…