Bos Wars and Egoboo

There's a new Bos Wars release - version 2.4 comes with a new resource system and a new tutorial (presumably to reflect the new resource system). These days Bos Wars is the flagship game using Stratagus, the 2D isometric RTS engine that powers Wargus and the lesser developed Stargus.

Tutorials are good. If you want a good player retention rate for your game, code a tutorial. I can't stress enough how effective that is - most players are lazy. Take me for instance. I'm busy, if I play a game I want near instantaneous enjoyment. If I don't know what's going on I will quit a game within 30s. Many FOSS games I install are uninstalled very quickly - not because I don't like them, but because I don't have the desire to learn them on my own. (Note, I do not play commercial games at all.)

Good news for Egoboo! It gains SDL_mixer support - Egoboo now music and improved sound support. They still don't have somebody producing Linux builds though, which is a shame because Egoboo could have a good following again if it were more accessible on Linux. Still, Windows binaries are available.

The latest Egoboo version is 2.3.9 - released last week but since it's only announced (that I know of) in their forums it's hard to come by. The Egoboo community have added a lot to it over the years, and the game has quite a lot of content and depth if you get into it. It just needs marketing better and a Linux build.

Egoboo "World Map"

There's also a new Cultivation release. I like this project, it's an innovative game design and I like seeing that development is still ongoing, although this version doesn't bring much other than bug fixes and new sounds.