Shadow game prototyping challange, FreedroidRPG lifesigns, recording GNU/Linux games with glc

Shadow & light mock-up, thrown together by Danc

Daniel Cook of Lost Garden started a shadow and light based game prototype challenge. Lost Garden is probably the best thing to read related to gaming. If you would like to participate via an open source project, feel free to gather a team on the FreeGameDev.net forums!

There's some activity surrounding FreedroidRPG. The students Kaisa Anttila, Markku Väisänen and Sami Mylly wrote an usability study of the game and it's editor. The criticism is very general and there are no direct solutions provided. The documents are supposed to serve interested developers in helping improving FreedroidRPG.

Version 0.11 of the game is scheduled for... soon? Anyways, for now the 0.11 pre-release candidate is available.

Video of Slune, made with glc

glc is now my tool of choice when it comes to recording game videos on GNU/Linux systems. It is faster than xvidcap, istanbul or gtk-recordMyDesktop and is also the only app that manages to records audio on my machine. It's also easy to install! (Hints: cat /proc/cpuinfo to find out what flags to use, O2 is written with an uppercase o, if you don't know where to install to install it to /usr/ and also execute the install script as root.) Using it is easy too! Just run glc-capture game-name and press Shift+F8 to start/stop recording. There is even a script provided, which will convert the glc files to mp4 (attention, non-free), the preferred format of Vimeo. If you know how to use ffmpeg to create an Theora/OGG video, you can probably export to that format instead.

glc is great! I want you to use it! I've used it a lot already. It is to my knowledge the first Linux direct rendering capturing tool that does not suck! If you have any trouble whatsoever with it, you're invited to ask for help in this thread. (There's also #glc on irc.freenode.net.)

Edit: Many thanks to Pyry for writing glc and making me aware of it!

Speaking of game videos, I discovered some game-exclusive video hosting services! GameVee even supports OGG/Theora!

One more thing: Apricot is looking for animators!