M64’s Games Blog

Hello my dear readers. I have put up a wiki for the Post-apocalyptic economic game – temporary code name is PEG. The link is here. Editing is open for registered users. I hope you don’t mind me self-hosting it.

Just a quick update on what is going on. I am having hard time at work, so I probably will not post any longer update until weekend. The shared world idea has been named “commundo” from latin “commūnis mundus”, or shared world. There is an ongoing discussion about possible settings for the first commundos at FGD forums if you have not already joined it, you might consider doing so. Now some may worry that such discussions with dozens of ideas going into different directions can disperse the effort that should be focused on the creation of the first commundo, but I would never call a discussion harmful. We need to consider all the options before making a decision. Another thing – if you have not noticed some time ago I have added a Creative Commons license widget to the blog – all published materials are covered by CC-BY-SA.

And now an important announcement – we are getting a spam flood in the comments. Therefore I am introducing some more strict filtering rules and this may go as far as manually moderating some of them, so don’t be surprised if yours is not published immediately.

One of the curses of the Free Software Games movement is art, known locally as the content – pictures, 3d models, animations and sounds used to present the gameplay. The curse is that even when we have good code, we can’t acquire enough content and thus many of the Open Source games look if not outright ugly, then at least like something from previous decade or more. If you are involved in the Free Games community, you know why it is so – although art can constitute as much as 80% of the workload of creating a modern game, artists constitute only something like 20% of the community of open source game developers, the other 80% being programmers. (continue reading…)

Before I’ll start posting more original content I would like to elaborate a bit more about what I will hopefully be doing on this blog, why and how. I am a man of many interests, perhaps even of many passions. I think it’s good to be able to connect your passions. Some time ago I’ve managed to connect my passions for computer games and for programming by becoming a game developer. Now I would like to add another passion to that duo – a passion for freedom and for Free Software. This blog will be a chronicle of my attempts on doing so. (continue reading…)

Hi there and welcome to my blog. I am m64, a frequent poster on the freegamedev.net forum. I have created this blog to publish my thoughts on games in general and especially on Free Software games. I have quite a few ideas on the subject and I feel that publishing them all on FGD forum would constitute spamming and attention whoring. At times I also like to write longer articles and these are not well suited for publication on a forum.

So this blog will be used to publish things that for some reason don’t belong in forums. Possible topics include: game design ideas, development and financing models for open source games, my general opinions about Free Games scene and perhaps some reflecions about games I’ve played lately. I encourage everyone to take part in the discussion. Last thing: it will probably take me a few days to set up the wordpress correctly, so don’t be surprised by sudden changes on the site.