LINUXGAMES

Behold! What has been discussed and requested countless of times in the past, finally happens: Skulltag is open source now! And this not only covers the current version of the code, but includes the full history from our SVN repository. In particular, the full source of all public and all official beta builds made since I took over the Skulltag development five years ago is included.

In these suprisingly roleplaying-heavy times, something as laser-focused strategic as this is entirely welcome. It’s a proper, honest-to-god RTS – but, delightfully uncommonly, it doesn’t bow slavishly to the C&C or Total War thrones. Were my thumbs not too bust helping to type these very words, I would certainly hold at least one of them aloft.

It’s fair to say that we’ve neglected our linux fans for a little while now, but I’m hoping to change that. I have just finished uploading:
- Nixinstaller
- 32 and 64 bit RPM
- 32 and 64 bit Deb
Packages for DEFCON and Multiwinia.

If you are linux fan, please let us know how you get on with them.

Q: What about Android or Linux?
A: Those are possible too! It all depends on how much money we can raise.

In a month long event, we will release an avatar for one of the Horsemen every Tuesday throughout February. Each will be priced as a standard premium avatar and includes new voices, animations, and models plus they will each include their symbols for the first three days they are available. The Horsemen are NOT limited edition and will be available from this point on.

For one a lack of consumable hoarding. The Tome philosophy is that hoarding potions and scrolls until the end of the game is neither fun nor particularly easy to balance. Things generally handled by consumables like healing and teleportation are handled through runes and infusions instead, which are basically swappable talents. Likewise Tome dungeons do not respawn. Once an area is cleared it’s generally cleared for good. The game’s leveling and xp system is balanced around these concepts so the player should never feel the need to grind to advance.

Tome also comes with a full tile set, has sound and music, as well as an integrated chat system so you can ask advice of other players without leaving the game (hence the thread title). It also supports ASCII and has an options menu so almost any feature you don’t enjoy you can turn off.

There’s more, the game’s pretty innovative and it would be hard for me to cover everything. But briefly, a friendly interface that supports both keyboard and mouse based play along with fully functional auto-explore, a fairly unique combat system, a polished UI (which will be customizable next beta), a very active developer (the game’s seen 37 beta releases in the last two years), and a growing player base.

Plus… it’s pretty.

We have finally completed development of Oil Rush, naval strategy game: http://oilrush-game.com/

Version 1.0 will be available worldwide on January, 25 for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Distribution channels are: Steam, Desura, UNIGINE store, Ubuntu Software Center and some other digital stores.

Retail release in UK, Germany, France, Scandinavia, Australia/New Zealand, South Africa and Benelux will be provided by Iceberg Interactive a little bit later.

Gameplay Change Recap

- Dropped cargo persists for 15 minutes, regardless of sector shutdown. Crates will eventually time out by class, making certain drops last much longer than others.
- New missions from the PCC.
- Scoring issues with Deneb War have been fixed. Deneb web-stats coming.
- Bounty Hunter report consolidated to a weekly post. More uses of in-game news are coming.
- Sound effects tweaked. Audio limiter also added to more platforms.
- Improved the game launcher (Updater) handling of certain timeout cases and network conditions, across all platforms.
- Xang Xi Self Propelled Concussion Launcher now has double the ammo, double the prox radius (60m) costs 1/10th to reload.
- Many, many bugfixes, great and small. No more “lost” convoy ships, etc.
- PC game startup and load process have been changed to use the same loading graphics as the mobile versions.

Our Next Priorities

Revamping the faction system is currently the top “big” gameplay priority. Triple-PoS will go away, and there will be tradeoffs to different factional alignments, along with other long-discussed changes.

Before this drops, however, you may also see some cool Deneb War stuff (web stats, etc), along with more addons for capships, improvements to capship ownership and management, and improvements to station conquest. Some of this work isn’t super time consuming, and we like to drop in quick gameplay improvements whenever we can.

Beyond that, there will be major changes to how missions are visible and available throughout the galaxy, along with a lot of updates intended to bring people together more effectively in the galaxy.

We’re working towards a major update, hopefully slated for an April timeframe. Like all our best laid plans, this could be de-railed by some amazing new opportunity or other, but the current goal is to fix and tweak a lot of areas of gameplay in the near future.

But one of the main reasons these guys are our community heroes this year is what they’ve done with that success: they’ve used it as a platform to launch (or relaunch) a range of great indie games that deserve a broader audience. Four times this year, they’ve released new bundles that showcase a particular game or developer: Trine, Frozen Synapse, Voxatron, and most recently Introversion’s whole catalogue. Each one has taken more than $700,000, a vast success for games that genuinely deserve it.