Xonotic 0.8.1 released & related news

For those that are not keeping up to the latest development branch (via the autobuilds), the Xonotic developers have released a new version with various smaller changes and new official maps.

From the user "Antibody" (known for his duel commentary videos) comes this nice video overview of the new features:

(please note that due to video capture performance reasons the graphic settings are pretty low, and the game can look much nicer with different settings)

On the longer term horizon of Xonotic development, there is the very exiting news that they are currently porting their game to run on the same engine that Unvanquished uses. With this the future of Xonotic is indeed much brighter, as their current engine has not seem much development lately. See more details in this thread.

Oh and while we are talking about FOSS arena FPS: A short while ago Red Eclipse also released a new version. Changes include updated to the AI Bots and a build in universal updater to easily follow the latest releases.

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European Women in Games Conference workshop

Women in Games Design conference 2015.
Uclan Senior Lecturer in Games design, Rhoda Daly will be discussing how to attract more girls onto University Games Courses on the panel Workshop Option 3 at WIG this September:

As part of this year's European Women in Games Conference, they are hosting a workshop dedicated to attracting more women to university games and technology courses. Women are in a big minority of all games courses at UK universities. Some courses have just a handful. However, a small number of courses have as many as 30 or 40% female students. What advice would you give universities wanting to achieve more? How did these course leaders together with their university manage this? How easy is it to attract many more talented girls from schools with just a few changes to the offering of existing courses? Discuss and find out out more in this workshop from graduates who have experienced these courses and course leaders who have worked hard to make these changes. This specific workshop takes places at 15.30 and you are invited to attend for free.

There are 9 other workshops that take place on the day along with keynotes, panels, a free lunch, the European Women in Games Hall of Fame awards and post conference networking drinks.
Workshops are an innovation at this years conference. Once in the morning and once in the afternoon the conference splits with 5 options available to delegates. In each session we expect between 10 and 40 delegates to get up close and personal with some of the acknowledged leaders of the industry to learn more about and debate a specialist subject. A cross between a Round Table and a Master Class, Workshop Chairs will lead the discussion on the topic for 45 minutes. Delegates can move freely between workshops.


The conference takes place on Sept 2nd at the Cavendish Campus of the University of Westminster in Central London. You can see full details of the programme and speakers at http://www.ewigconf.com/


The format of this year's conference means they are able to invite a limited number of course leaders, lecturers and students at university for free using a promotional code for when you order. These are full tickets with full access to the programme. The only restrictions are the numbers of tickets per educational establishment. This conference is targeted at women but they feel it is also equally relevant to men.
They also have an expo area where you can take a stand to promote your university course or special innovation to the 40+ speakers and 200 delegates we are expecting from the games industry.

Below are a few images taken from Rhoda's workshop. The activity focused on keyword prompts - media / schools / industry / graduates / culture / aspirations and so on. Each participant adapted the discussion outcomes to their locality to create relevant word clouds with a bananagram/scrabble set. Photographs were taken with the view that in the coming year, perhaps over monthly stages,a rebuild could be made of the cloud with the changes which have been implemented. Reflection upon these changes and hopefully some will lead to new challenges.

 

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Mini Sci-Fi Open Source Tower Defense Game

Purely by chance, I found an obviously abandoned but still fun to play mini tower defense with a skippable tutorial level and two playable missions, beautiful graphics and performance settings.

To be a master is to spam en mass

So you place towers and the shoot enemies that move towards your base. I know this! Being an impatient player type, I skipped past the tutorial and was annihilated in level 1.

Short enough messages in a hard enough tutorial level

The degree of my destruction was such, that I was thankful for the tutorial being there at all. Even though I did die in it, it taught me enough about the all-or-nothing early game (which some might refer as to "unbalanced") to get my strategy right.

Turn off for speed. Turn on for awesome!

You get 3 towers: that allows you to build more tower, one that allows you to shoot more and one that shoots. You can block paths and create mazes. There are no tower upgrades and that's okay.

All the plot. Space to continue. Take that non-skip-able intro video AAA games!

Mission #3 is not possible to win (prove me wrong) but it was a great experience to find that I was able to beat the tutorial mission after all. By deviating from the given instructions! If that's not freedom (besides being open source) then I don't know what is!

Yeah right...

Come to think of it, the ridiculousness of level 3 practically speaks "dear player, you should totally fork and make new levels!"

Made with love2d

The last commit to Turres Monacorum was in May 2014 and the game was made at a game jam. My experience dictates that this won't be picked up by the original developers any more but to any player with love2d installed, it will come as a wonderful, visually polished snack!

Love2D Tower Defense: Turres Monacorum

Download the mini tower defense game from the github release page and enjoy!

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