Owner: Libertygaming URL:http://www.libertygaming.blogspot.com Join Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 10:35:53 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Libertygaming is a blog dedicated to game development and Free softwares. Site statistics:Click here
The Ultimate Resource List for the Game Hackers 2007-07-21 09:32:00 This is a resource article for the Free software game developers.Hosting space, information on running your own project, where to promote your project and more are listed on this page. It is basically a collection of resources that would otherwise be unnoticed by developers looking for places to host their projects. No doubt, Free software developers can often get subversion access, bug tracking tools, and a place to host their website with no practically no strings attached. All your projects just to have to be Free software projects (A good reason why the rest of the software world don't use these resources, even freeware cannot use it). There are also a few information resources that I located across the vast internet over my years of travel. A lot of them are mostly for the general Free software world.This list will get new items add to to as time go on so check back for new listing. I hope the list will get more game specific as it evolve over time.Hosting places:There are lot o Read more:Ultimate
, Resource
, Hackers
I am back! 2007-07-20 08:17:00 As you might heard, I been without a real computer for a while. Well, that is over. My new computer with preinstalled Ubuntu just arrive yesterday. As you might imagine, I set up my computer to be hacking ready.I officially arrive back at the land of hackerdom!It is just too bad that I didn't get to hack new games for most of my summer vacation. I hope to make the best for the rest of my summer, because I'll have to go to school next month. It is going to seriously cut out time for me to write video games.In the next few week, you should see a few new games being released announced on this blog. First to go out will be my space invader clone.By the way, I teamed up with another aspiring game-hacker-in-training to create an online space combat racing game. You should see something like that a few week later.I hope to spin off a developer log blog so I don't spam you guys with contents that you are probably not interested in anyway.Expect to see further monetization of this blog, but
Strategies for Expanding Free Gaming 2007-07-14 12:19:00 Free gaming as we know it, have no pure-breed Free software vendors/studio surrounding it. Few Free games are ever commercial. Thus a myth developed about Linux do not have much games, which is not true. The success story of games like Battle for Wesnoth pale in comparison to other big Free software projects like Firefox. There are few projects that are big and ambitious yet still enjoy wide success.Practically everyone agree that gaming is one of the biggest bump on the road to widespread adoption of the Linux desktop.Probably many of us want more games, which are Free softwares.Still not all hope are lost. If our collective goal is to expand Free gaming's popularity so there are more Free games to play, along with more vibrant development of Free games, and we are willing to put in the effort, perhaps we have a chance. It may also further the goal of the Free software movement. It might even accelerate the adoption of the Linux desktop and finally lead to the magical "Year of the Li Read more:Strategies
, Gaming
Top 5 Must Read for Free Gaming 2007-07-06 22:15:00 The ultimate guide to your reading list for Free gaming is here! Some of them are essay that influence my thinking about Free gaming in general, economic, or just plain interesting to read. For some articles merely related to Free games, still other are not even about Free gaming, but offered insights relating to Free games. Yet, some articles are articles that I disagree with either entirely or parts of it, but I feel that they are still good read. Without further ado, here are the top 5 Free gaming articles!1. Debunking reasons not to open source indie freeware gamesThis article by Freegamer give reasons why you should make your games Free softwares, while also attacking fears and other bogus reasons often offered by freeware developers.2. The Bedroom Coder's Business ModelIt is a really good guide that show you how it is possible to be a bedroom coder and not sell your soul to game studio or companies. It is also one of the article that inspire me to write Making Money off Free Sof Read more:Gaming
News: Rubygame 2.0.1 Released 2007-06-30 20:41:00 Today, Rubygame 2.0.1 is released! This is a release I been anticipating all this month. Included into this releases are some bugfixes. For example, C code segfault are fixed. So you will not be meet with a strange error, thus saving you time.Rubygame is the library that I used to develop games in the Ruby programming languages. Thanks Jacius for developing this library. None of my games wouldn't be in a graphical form without Jacius!Withou further delay, I present you the changelog and the download page. If you missed the homepage link, here it is.I highly encourage you guys to download it. This way, when you download my future games, you don't have to brother installing Rubygame further down the road. You might even become game developers with it!Happy Hacking,Kiba
We'll be back! 2007-06-28 12:54:00 This blog will resume posting in two weeks time! I will also begin to resume production of my video games and libraries.In the mean time, I am working on meaty contents that should be interesting. They will be posted when they're done. The goal is to post all these interesting contents before the new computer arrives.One of the article will be about building a subculture, and the other one is about specific actions that I made so far to make the goal of writing Free games for a living come true.You might also notice changes to the blog. I am using ProjectWonderful and Google Adsense advertising services. Projectwonderful is an ad auction service and Google Adsense do contextual advertising. I still hadn't make any money yet. I blame that to the low traffic of my blog, thus not making any sort of money. So in order to see some actual revenue, I would have to work on making my traffic bigger.Also, I'll be getting a dell computer with ubuntu preinstalled. It will have 1 GB of RAM, an
Some Bad News From the Author 2007-06-10 16:15:00 Until further notice, this blog will suspend further update and all software development by this author are halted.My computer is broke so until I get a new computer, no new posts will be added to this blog.So if you notice no update lately, this is why.I will not post in a while.P.S: I am posting this from a different computer. Read more:Author
Day 2: Learning the Art of Gimping and Everything Else 2007-06-04 21:11:00 Day 2 Statistics:Project: RubyemonPhysical loc(sloccount): 156Milestone: Work on loading menu begins, writing a system for saving and loading games.Subproject: rbgooeyPhysical loc(sloccount): 1,486Milestone: Work on adding image loading for UI beginCommits for Rubyemon: 10Average time between commits: 1.38 hour(s)Commits for rbgooey: 7Average time between commits: 7.42 hour(s)Commits total: 18 commitsEnd Time: 01:46:37 Tuesday UTCToday, we add some images for the UI, toy with creating the game code, as well working on the interface for loading games. Some missing features forced me to go over to rbgooey project.I am also developing a new feature in rbgooey that should allow me to add clickable images such as the button below the statistic. I am still not done with the addition of this new feature. We'll be done with this feature tomorrow. There is another feature that allow for omiting the background color for texts. That mean rbgooey will get yet another release by the end of this we Read more:Learning
, Everything
Day One: SSH Woes 2007-06-03 19:03:00 Physical LOC by end of Sunday UTC time: 105 LOC (SLOCCount)Languages: Ruby 100%Commits: 15 times, average is about 31.11 minutes between every commits since the start of the project.Milestone: Project is finally set up. Slash-screen is coded.I only managed to get as far as setting up the slash-screen for the game and then ending at the incomplete task to generating a simple YAML file to create new games. It is not my most productive day.The most annoying aspect of this unproductive hacking session is having to enter the pass-phrase to authenticate my identity every single time I want to commit. It is not really freakish annoying, but annoying enough for me to risk it all for just one hour or two to get rid of that pass-phrase forever. Due to habit, I have the tendency to wait for the commit to happen, when in fact, a pass-phrase is blocking the commit until I answered it. I learned my lesson about SSH key generation. Just don't specify a pass-phrase or you'll be forced later to enter Read more:Day One
A Considerable Delay....... 2007-06-02 19:15:00 This image below is all the progress I managed to make for this weekend for my space arcade game, Space Fighter Ace. The game will have to wait, or simply released later this week. It is not because I am busy or lazy, and other reasons relating to my productivity. Rather, I managed to get myself locked out from rubyforge(after giving the wrong passwords too many time), making me unable to commit anything to my project's subversion repository, thus delaying the progress. Afterward, I finally managed to regain access after the rubyforge administrator undo the automatic blacklist me but not enough time for me to meet my Saturday self imposed deadline.As for rbgooey, the GUI library for Rubygame, their repository is hosted on a different site, so their progress wasn't delayed. Rbgooey got lucky, so we're releasing a new version after mere days of the first release. Version 0.0.2 sport a new feature and some bugs fixed. If you're a Rubygame user and in needed of a GUI library, check thi Read more:Delay
Annoucement of New Projects 2007-05-31 09:38:00 I am here to announce you my first project to be unveiled here at this blog, rbgooey!Rbgooey is an alternative GUI library for Rubygame and also the first of its kind to be released for the Rubygame library.This library, version 0.0.1 only support texts and limited typing operations. Over the following days, I'll continues to extend it and refine the API so everyone who use it will get a much better(and more awesome) experience in using the library. This library is the culmination of all my knowledge in writing a GUI library using Rubygame, although it isn't complete yet.The image I show you below is the screenshot of a really cool example application I developed to demonstrate the rbgooey library. It randomly display new texts of five characters long in random locations on the display screen every second. 10 seconds latter, the application reset and the process started over. In total, there should be 50 pieces of texts every cycle.Code:Enough said, let get to the real code(Don't fo Read more:Projects
Making Money off Free Software Games? 2007-05-24 14:23:00 (I decided to repost this article after I deleted it. Sorry for RSS readers who come to find it while missing)For some of us, Free softwares are just nice things that they can do without. They only care about it if it is better than the alternative softwares either proprietary or Free. Some of these people promote Free softwares for only pragmatic reasons. But for some of us, we really do believe in the ideal of the four freedom that every software users should have.The reality is, the ideal of Free softwares is something some of us live by. The pragmatic values of Free softwares are nice, but however they are only secondary. The morality and ethical concerns come first.Sometime, when we're trying to make a living, we're forced to write proprietary softwares. To write proprietary softwares is to violate our ethical standard. To not write these softwares is to face starvation. It is a dilemma.The solution to the dilemma is to try to make a living on Free softwares and make it viable b Read more:Money
, Software
, Games
Rubygame Tutorial Part 2 2007-05-20 18:38:00 Note: A bug reside in the code example that cause the code to not work at all. The author will fix it after he got his new computer when he can start programming again.In part 2 of the Rubygame tutorial series we will be learning how to control a Rubygame application's CPU resource usage as well as writing a sprite system for our player.For a little word of caution, part 2 is much longer than part 1. Since it is a really long article, I suggest you to print it out and read it later if you need to.If you did not complete part 1 of this tutorial, it is highly recommended that you do so before continuing this tutorial. Otherwise you will miss a critical proportion of knowledge required to write video games with Rubygame. You may not also understand newer parts of this tutorial.We'll jump right in learning how to control CPU usage so your Rubygame applications doesn't suck your computer's CPU resource dry. By controlling CPU usage, we also get the added advantage of consistent frame-ra Read more:Tutorial
In Between Updates 2007-05-15 18:12:00 The premature death of this blog is greatly exaggerated. (Not that anybody thinks we're are.)Anyway, I want to let the readers know that we're still working on part 2 of the Rubygame tutorial. But it is taking far longer than we thought it would be. I predict part 2 will be scary long in comparison to part 1. It already surpassed part 1 in both words count, lines, and line of code. I blame it on the sprite part of Part 2.Have no fear, half of the goal for Rubygame tutorial part 2 are already done. I planned to have it out by the end of this week.Did I forgot to mention that Freegamer linked to us? A splendid blog linked to us and give us some traffic! I am thrilled.Speaking of traffics; I aimed to monetize this blog. Yes, advertising will be coming to this blogs. So don't be alarmed at all these new text ads and an ads banner when they suddenly appeared. It will be probably coming in a few weeks, or maybe shorter.Before we let you guys off the hook, we have an interesting tidbit to
Rubygame Tutorial Part 1 2007-05-13 13:52:00 This tutorial series is a crash course in writing video games using the Ruby programming languages and Rubygame, a game development library for Ruby. It assumes that you have basic knowledge of programming along with knowledge of Ruby's syntax.If you do not have Rubygame and/or the Ruby interpreter installed, it is suggested that you do so before continuing this tutorial. This tutorial will assume you're using 2.0.0 version of Rubygame.In this tutorial, we will be creating a dodgeball game using just Rubygame and Ruby as we write this tutorial out. No other libraries will be used. The final game will be licensed under the GPL. This game will be called Rubies Dodgeball!In Part 1 of this tutorial, we'll be creating a screen and than setting up a basic game loop.Initialize a Display ScreenWe'll start by assuming that everything will be in one directory named rubies_dodgeball.The first thing you will do is of course require Rubygame and initialize it. Then after that, you will create a Read more:Tutorial
Welcome to Liberty Gaming 2007-05-12 16:34:00 This blog is all about Free software gaming. It will include news, tutorial, and opinions about Free software games, regardless of its prices!And by the way, freeware searchers, move along, nothing to see here. There will certainally be no proprietary games that will be reviewed on this blog! And for the people who like commercial games, you might see some commercial Free software games in the future. (Although we will probably never see one for years)What you say? Confused? No problems, I'll refer you to this link to clear up your confusion.Without further ado, let start blogging!What is upcoming in Liberty Gaming
contents:A Rubygame Tutorial: A tutorial introducing you to the Ruby programming language and the obscure world of....Rubygame!We'll have a new review of a game once we spot a promising game to try. Read more:Welcome
News: Pyweek 5 and More 2007-07-22 16:02:00 Pyweek, the python game contest, will take place in the first week of September. All contestants must submit their games as Free softwares. Registration for the contest will open on August 3, 2007.The contest is named Pyweek 5. It will be the fifth contest to take place in the history of the Pyweek website.For more information on the contest, please visit the their website. Here are some pointers:1. About: Explain the rules and what the pyweek contest is about.2. Timetable: sch elude for the contest including registration, theme voting, winners announcement and more.I'll be entering this contest myself. I highly encourage others to do so too. This will increase our expertise as well the number of games written in Python as well increase the number of Free games in the world.You got pretty much about 1(41 days as of this writing) month to prepare so use your time wisely. I hope to use this time to quickly produce a number of games. In that time, I'll be learning pygame.Meanwhile, I st
New Wiki For Free Games Launched! 2007-08-13 18:18:00 Hello readers and visitors! Today I announced the public launch of a new wiki called libregamewiki.It is an encyclopedia on Free games and the Free gaming world.Why I created this wiki? Well, I decided that the Free gaming world need a dedicated wiki of its own. It is not going to be about Linux gaming, but the whole Free gaming world! Plus it would be nice to know what the gameplay is like, what is the storyline, who written it, what license it is under, and more such information.Plus it help with my ambition of creating making a Free gaming community(I never told you this before I think) and help make Free gaming become a major force in not only the Free software community but the gaming culture in general.It is a place for Free gamer diehard who don't want to encounter a single proprietary game. It is going to be a place where people can gain lot of knowledge about Free games. It is going to be a place where people go to find new information about Free gaming, their hackers, and th Read more:Launched
, Games
, Wiki
My Blogging Experience So Far: 10 Things I Learned 2007-08-11 12:33:00 It been only a few months since I started blogging. Indeed I learn a lot in that time too. I also applied my knowledge that I gained from blogs about making money and articles on blogging. A lot of them are indeed true. I also learned a few things along the way too. I am not an expert though, but I did have some modest success(if you count thousand of visits last month modest).Before I talked about what I learned about blogging, I discuss some potential benefit for game developers that come from blogging.Potential rewards of blogging for game developers:1. Additional traffic source for your projects. If they're interested in what you have to say, you probably have your own market for your games and new starting points for new websites you're going to develop. For example, when I launch that game devlog, all the new traffic come from this blog, even if it is very small. I have yet to try announcing my games here.2. Reputation and ego gratification. You'll be a little bit more known t Read more:Learned
, Blogging
Success and Neglect 2007-09-08 10:25:00 Libregamewiki now far eclipses this blog. About 40,000 pageloads, 12,000 visitors were recorded in my stat yesterday. This blog is so far got at best 5,000 pageload in its best month(which is July).The wiki got dugg.Thus, the wiki grow bigger, even though many of the contributions are essentially worthless(people adding freeware games and such).Little did I know that submitting the wiki to FSDaily would create such a chain reactions.Digg propel my wiki to traffic unimaginable probably 3 days ago. It is an amazing achievement for me.But I been neglecting this site. It is hard for me to write stuff on this blog. My effort on the wiki already reap great benefit.I planned to revive the site and then cranks out great articles to read. Thus making my blog useful again. Read more:Success
, Neglect
What I been Up To These Days? 2007-10-21 14:15:00 So what been happening between all these days between the last post and this post?Well, I am monetizing more of libregamewiki.org. It is now earning me at least 10 cents more per day. For the purpose of monetizing the site and increasing the site's usefulness, I added a forum, planet, and even a blog. I also experimented with the dimension of the ads boxes. I found button ads to be much more profitable.The Libregamewiki site have about 200 articles, over 4000 edits and currently 4 hyperactive editors. So it is growing rather fast.On the game development side, I been forever working on a game that was supposed to be complete last month in a pyweek contest. If only I have more motivations to finish the project, I would earn more money than what I am earning. Given the previous history with my development you could say I don't have what it take to create commercial free games.What is coming up for this blog? Hopefully, regular output of new content. I think I am going to open up a foru
The Importance of Dreams 2007-10-24 18:34:00 My dream is to become one of the first to make a living off entirely free games. It is this dream that I aspire in my various projects. It is also a very real dream for me because I am taking steps to reach my dream.That dream has been criticized. They see that I will fail no matter how hard I try. They criticize and yet often never offer feedback on how I can reach my dream. Basically, they said "don't even brother". (What is described here are not representative of all critics)Yet I persisted in my goal. Although I have little to show for, I am making steady progress in term of revenues(I am breaking personal revenues records ever since I started). That, at least I am happy. (Although these critics laugh at my small earning. They won't laugh in the near future :) )One day, after looking at my profits and look at older posting on this blog, I begin to realize something important. I am building a pretty side income . Even if I don't succeed, at least I have this source of revenues. Read more:Dreams
Twisted Shootout Version 0.0.1 (pre-alpha) is OUT! 2008-01-11 14:54:00 Well, Twisted
Shootout is finally out.Like I say, it will not be so much fun to play. You can expect that in later versions, but not now.Nonetheless, Twisted Shootout is the most developed game ever by me.Now that I finally announced the release, I can start developing the next evolution of Twisted Shootout.It will have a revamped map system at the very least. I hope for better enemy AI and better battle mechanics(ok, that is maybe too much?). At the very best, maybe I will implement a music and sound system and a menu to go with it.You can discuss the post here.
Twisted Shootout Release is Imminent 2008-01-08 19:55:00 I been working on a game called Twisted
Shootout over several months and finally it is almost ready for its first release.Twisted Shotout is a 2d shooter game inspired by the game Metal Slugs but the first release of the game will probably not be very fun. However, it marks a milestone in my game development journey. I finally actually complete a playable game and it is also the furthest in development!I do plan to try to make twisted shootout a fun game though as the development of the game goes on.For now, I have a techdemo available for download for testing purposes. For more information, visit the forum thread on the techdemo release.You can also discuss this blog post in this thread. Read more:Release
, Imminent
The KISS Principle is Hard 2007-12-29 12:35:00 The most obvious principle in software development is KISS or Keep It Simple Stupid is a hard principle to follow.And it show up in my incompetence during the development of my upcoming Twisted Shootout game.Just today, I made the finishing touch to my programming task involving collision detection.I just solved the final piece of puzzle with a simple adjustment of a fricking variable.(After a spontaneous look at an overlooked variable)All this time, I been thinking of overly complicated solution to my problems when it is right under my nose!Before I had to adjust the variable, I also tried an overly complicated algorithm that went nowhere until a ruby-loving friend with a mathematic degree told me that I should his simple approach. It replaced like 99% of various conditional statements, v Read more:Principle
RubyWeekend Hour 10: A game is starting to emerge 2008-06-13 20:18:00 There is not much to see here because I am still coding the foundation of enemies generation. Nonetheless, I did created the zombie graphic. My idea is to create variants of these. However, due to time constraint, I won't produce variants until the game is feature complete.When the enemy generation feature is complete, the program will start to resembles a game.My goal doesn't really reach far bey Read more:emerge
RubyWeekend Hour 9: New graphics 2008-06-13 19:10:00 Instead of coding the enemy generation system or the weapon system, I decided to create new graphics.The first image was music item, which you will need to acquire a certain amount in order to escape the zombie infested server and win the game.The second image was the infamous GNU tnt bomb first seen in the title screen. It have a 3 by 3 blast radius and a delay of 5 second. Anything in its radius
RubyWeekend Hour 8: Camera complete 2008-06-13 18:03:00 I finally got the camera class finished for now. That's a lot of code for one class.Next stop, it seem will be zombie generation and weapon system. Read more:Camera
, complete
RubyWeekend Hour 7: Take Forever to Get This One Right 2008-06-13 17:04:00 The progress so far...I finally finished the right and left proportion of the camera class. It took me a while to get it right because it crash so slow sometime. Also it involves lot of python to ruby code conversion. So it added to the time of coding the camera part.The good thing is that I didn't have to figure how to do camera out.(Thank god!)The next time I posts on this blog, I hope to get th Read more:Forever
, Right
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