Ready to try the next set of upcoming games on Steam? Wait no more, as the Steam Game Festival February 2021 edition is now live with plenty to take a look at.

The event features over 500 demos across multiple genres, plus developer-hosted livestreams and chats. Additionally this time around the event itself will have its own livestream show on the event page and Twitch for the first day featuring a select group of demos.

We'll be gradually going over the list and pointing out / capturing footage of a few that stand out. For now, here's a few that look delightful that offer up a Linux demo for the event:

• Alisa
  • "Alisa is a Horror-themed Action Adventure game and a genuine throwback to the golden age of 90s 3D games."
• Don't Forget Me
  • "A jazz-punk adventure game with a twist, Don’t Forget Me is a new breed of puzzle game. Dive into the memories of your patients, use your own observations to unwrap their minds and uncover a dark conspiracy set to claim dominion over humanity."
• Dwerve
  • "Dwerve is a tower defense dungeon crawler RPG. It tells the story of a young dwarven tinkerer that adventures into dwarven ruins armed with turrets and traps, the only weapons that can protect the dwarves from Witch Queen Vandra the Wicked and her army of bloodthirsty trolls and monstrous creatures."
• Kathy Rain: Director's Cut
  • "Award-winning adventure Kathy Rain returns in the Director’s Cut, featuring an extended story with more puzzles to solve and new areas to explore. Witness the rise of an iconic detective as you uncover a dark and sinister truth hiding behind the calm exterior of a small rural town."
• Loop Hero (no icon but Linux demo is there)
  • "The Lich has thrown the world into a timeless loop and plunged its inhabitants into never ending chaos. Wield an expanding deck of mystical cards to place enemies, buildings, and terrain along each unique expedition loop for the brave hero."
• Loveland
  • "Take on the role of The Detective, a member of an agency tasked with hunting down supernatural and cryptid creatures. Will you be able to uncover the mysteries of Loveland?"
• Luna's Fishing Garden
  • "Luna's Fishing Garden is a cozy fishing and building game. Catch fish, trade it in and create the garden of your dreams by planting new trees, placing water objects and bringing animals to the archipelago."
• One Dreamer
  • "Manipulate the world around you by editing source code in an adventure game about a burnt out indie game developer's quest to fulfill a lifelong dream."
• Viscerafest
  • "Viscerafest is a Sci-Fi Fantasy Singleplayer Arena FPS with minor Collectathon elements. Fight through hordes of aliens and eldritch monstrosities wielding a slew of powerful weapons, juggling your resources, and exploring over 26 intricately designed hand crafted levels."

There's absolutely loads more coming to Linux, a fair amount just don't have a demo (either for Linux or at all). Those are just a bunch that immediately stand out to me and as always it's quite subjective whenever we do a list to tastes. Be sure to give your recommendations in the comments.

It's still a shame that having a demo is no longer a sure thing but it's nice to see them used like this too, as it's a fun bit of marketing for developers and gives us a chance to test and find out about new games we weren't aware of before.  The whole event runs until Tuesday, February 9 at 10AM PST / 6PM UTC.

See the event page here and you can find the entire list of demos available on Steam any time here .

Ready for another huge Steam Festival? It shall be returning with the Steam Game Festival, February 2021 edition. Plus there's a fresh Steam Beta that Linux users will want to try out.

For the Steam Game Festival it goes live on February 3 at 10AM PT / 6PM UTC. Much like the previous festivals, it's all about giving developers a chance to showcase their upcoming games. There's going to be tons of demos across various genres for you to try, plus there will also be livestreams where developers will talk about various topics surrounding their games from development to live gameplay.

Watch video on YouTube.com

As usual, we shall be going over to find all the Linux demos worth taking a look at so be sure to come back to GamingOnLinux on February 3 to see what we liked.

You can follow the event page here .

Now onto something related: there's a fresh Steam Client Beta available as of January 30 which polishes up the shader cache and processing system on Steam. This is the feature that is supposed to make games smoother, so it's worth giving it another go. Here's the changelog :

• Fixed a bug where processing Vulkan shaders would run out of memory on NVIDIA Pascal cards and older
• Re-enabled Vulkan shader processing on NVIDIA
• Fixed a bug where NVIDIA shader cache files above 2GB couldn't be loaded
• Greatly improved memory usage and disk I/O when processing NVIDIA cache files (requires driver 460.x or newer)
• Updated to latest Fossilize, picking up some general memory usage improvements

Tomorrow, January 23 there's going to be an online GodotCon that's going live on YouTube. This is a chance for anyone interested to learn more about the free and open source game engine Godot Engine.

Interestingly, it won't be live. The talks are pre-recorded according to the announcement. However, to help with that and so you can chat with the Godot team and other users and developers using Godot, the team has now set up their own dedicated social chat area using Rocket.chat.

Schedules available as a PDF and Google Sheet . Looking over it, some of the talks are quite exciting! Lead developer Juan Linietsky for example, will be giving a talk on the new rendering coming with Vulkan in Godot 4.

It's happening between 8:45 UTC to 16:00 UTC. You can watch it right here! The livestream is embed below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

See the full announcement here .

Got a slow weekend ahead? Well now it might be a little busier as there's a good few developers participating in The Big Adventure Event which is now live on Steam.

What's this all about then? Organised with help from indie developer and publisher Hitcents, it's a celebration of the classic adventure game genre. They've packed the event with demos, new games, livestreams and more. The event takes place from now January 21 until January 25.

It's a genuinely good event too, looking over there's a fair few titles I had totally forgotten about or had just never seen before. Plenty have a Linux demo too, which is wonderful to see.

Here's a few random upcoming picks of what to take a look at that I'm excited for:

Born Punk - "A former combat hacker, a corporate CEO and a malfunctioning android get possessed by mysterious, otherworldly entities and must band together to save themselves and uncover the entities' origins. Talk, puzzle and explore your way through this (often humorous) cyberpunk thriller."

Growbot - "A point-and-click adventure about a robot saving her home from a dark crystalline force. Set upon a biopunk space station bursting with fantastic plants and aliens."

Kathy Rain: Director's Cut (only just announced today!) - "Award-winning adventure Kathy Rain returns in the Director’s Cut, featuring an extended story with more puzzles to solve and new areas to explore. Witness the rise of an iconic detective as you uncover a dark and sinister truth hiding behind the calm exterior of a small rural town."

One Dreamer - "Help Frank, a burnt out indie game developer, rediscover his love for video games while struggling to release his debut title. Reprogram objects, fix bugs and solve coding puzzles as you journey through the English voiced story of One Dreamer."

Rosewater - "Rosewater is a thrilling Western adventure set in an alternate 19th century. Harley Leger and her ragtag posse embark on a harrowing journey across Western Vespuccia, encountering bandits, rebels, visionaries, eccentrics, and many more friends and foes on their quest for fame and riches."

Slender Threads - "Slender Threads is a point-and-click thriller adventure where unseen forces bind the fate of an unremarkable traveling salesman to the peculiar town he one day arrives in."

The Darkside Detective: A Fumble in the Dark - "Delouse your room with sage and pack up your travel-sized ouija board, it’s time to enter Twin Lakes - America’s 34th most haunted city. Join Detective McQueen as he puzzles his way through six chilling cases, risking life and pixelated limb to solve the macabre mysteries that plague this poor town."

The Drifter - "A Pulp Adventure Thriller - A drifter, murdered, finds himself alive again seconds before his death. Struggling to maintain his sanity, can he unravel the conspiracy surrounding his condition and those hunting him?"

See the full event page here .

Be sure to comment on anything you play that's worth a look to let your fellow GOL readers know.

You've heard a lot about various packaging systems on Linux from deb to rpm and the next generation with Snap and Flatpak, but what about how games get built and packaged up?

Well, that's what Linux game porter Ethan Lee wanted to talk about and show off during the Linux App Summit 2020. Interestingly, it sounds like Ethan Lee put in their talk plan after seeing us announce the event. For those who aren't familiar with Ethan Lee you can check out their port portfolio here which shows just how many games they've shipped including the likes of: Streets of Rage 4 which just recently released, VVVVVV, Owlboy, FEZ, TowerFall Ascension, Dust: An Elysian Tail and a vast many more. Ethan Lee also created and maintains FNA , which is a reimplementation of the Microsoft XNA Game Studio 4.0 Refresh libraries.

The full video can be seen below at timestamp 2:20:20

Watch video on YouTube.com

Much like on Windows, there's different ways of building games and what's shown here is just one way but it's a nice peek behind the development curtain that you don't often get to see when it comes to games.

If you wish to support the work that Ethan Lee does for Linux ports and FNA head over to the GitHub Sponsors page .

Interested in all the work the open source consulting firm Collabora are doing with Valve to help improve Linux gaming? We've got you covered.

We've already been over a few bits of what they're doing together, like their Linux Kernel work that will hopefully be live with Linux 5.11 and also their work on the Steam Linux Runtime Container system . Collabora have been doing a lot of other work in the open source space too that we've been following, like the Monado runtime for VR and AR (XR) and their work on the Panfrost driver for Mali .

During the Linux App Summit 2020, Collabora developer Vivek Das Mohapatra did a presentation giving a whistle-stop tour of their work to give an overview of all the bits and pieces. It's about 28 minutes, so it won't take you long to go through if you want a nice way to catch up.

You can see the full video below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

What really captured my interest was the mention about their work with "Atomic Updates & A/B Booting", which Vivek Das Mohapatra mentioned can help with a "game console like piece of kit". While no direct reason was mentioned for working on it, Vivek Das Mohapatra said it has been a "big chunk" of the work they've been doing and that the hope is we will see it "real soon".

It's interesting as such a system should allow both seamless and fool-proof system updates that something like SteamOS would benefit from. This is a similar sounding system to what the SteamOS-like distribution GamerOS currently uses too and we know that Valve at least had plans in the past to go back to SteamOS at some point .

System76 are turning 15 years old so to celebrate they're running a huge sale across most of their hardware and you can bag some huge savings.

The thing is, System76 have become in my opinion pretty essential to the Linux ecosystem. They've gone from tiny beginnings in 2005 selling hardware with Ubuntu tested and supported that all looked pretty generic and rebrands, to having their own factory and production line where they make custom cases for their Thelio desktop line (and eventually likely Laptops too). Not only that, they're also firmly committed to FOSS values too, with System76 continuing to roll out their Open Firmware and Open Source Embedded Controller to more devices.

Across this last year System76 have released a fair amount of new hardware too, they're always busy. New kit includes the sweet Galago Pro refresh which is back with Intel Xe and NVIDIA options along with what sounds like a better cooling system than a lot of others. There was also the insanely powerful Thelio Mega with four GPUs. Their Pop!_OS Linux distribution continues to do awesome things too.

With their big birthday sale going on there's an instant discount across much of their hardware, however there's discounts on upgrades too as they say "the more you upgrade, the more you save" and if you order during the birthday event which runs until January 4 they will send you a commemorative System76 birthday pin.

See their full specials page here .

Steam has now been available on Linux, at least in Beta, for eight years now and it's come a long way.

What began with a limited Beta that saw over 60,000 people originally sign up for testing, Valve quickly expanded to a fully public release in December of 2012 and then onto a proper release in February 2013 .

During that time we've seen many ideas rise and fall, including Steam Machines and SteamOS but Valve continues onwards with Linux anyway. They continue working with various companies and individual contractors on various projects. Here's just a small slice of what they've been doing:

• Work on improving Mesa graphics drivers which this year had the ACO (AMD shader compiler) hooked up for smoother gameplay. Not only that, they have developers contracted to work on other parts of Mesa graphics drivers too and they continued hiring for it.
• They continue to be involved with the evolution of the Vulkan graphics API, with a few of their contractors helping to create new extensions.
• There's the almighty Proton compatibility layer for Steam Play , which they work with CodeWeavers and others individual developers on with the likes of DXVK and vkd3d-proton.
• The shader pre-cache system, along with shader background processing which (if you turn it on), should produce a smoother game from the moment you hit play.
• Also now available is the 'Pressure Vessel' Steam Linux Runtime Container system, developed with help from Collabora allowing games to run in a contained environment which can ensure older games continue working long into the future and it gives developers a stable environment to test against too. See some info on that here and they recently put the code for it up on GitLab .
• Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais has also been working on Gamescope, which they showed off at XDC 2020 that sounds hugely promising too. The idea of having such complete control over game display is very exciting and I hope Gamescope can be properly realised through 2021. A reader recently took a quick look at the scaling it offers.

Plenty more I've likely forgotten, as they do a lot and that's only things clearly specific to Linux. Valve appear to always be active behind the scenes as they continue to push Linux gaming from various directions.

In regards to actual games, Steam now appears to be listing over 7,000 that have Linux support. Back in April we wrote about how there were well over 6,000 and it seems to just keep going up adding multiple hundreds over the last few months. When taking the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer into account too, there's multiple thousands more playable (but usually not supported) on Linux.

Steam itself has been through a small evolution even in the last 1-2 years with the huge Steam Library refresh and Remote Play Together , the recent Curator News feature, Chat Filtering , the ability for developers to let Steam users request access to Beta versions with Steam Playtest , lots of smaller stuff coming from Steam Labs like store list filtering and so on.

Happy Eighth Beta Birthday, Steam For Linux.

With the Steam Digital Tabletop Fest coming up between October 21st through 26th, Valve have now put up the schedule so you can make space for some fun events.

This is the first ever event of its kind of Steam, dedicated to celebrating games that cross between physical and digital. Valve worked with Auroch Digital, to bring together virtual let’s plays, panels, talks and more streaming activities and of course a nice big sale too.

It was already announced before but now they've put up the main schedule of events, some of them include:

• An interview with game designer Sandy Petersen , who amongst others designed a lot of levels for DOOM and DOOM II.
• Adventure Game Panel - including Dean Woodward of Armello, Morgan Jaffit of Hand of Fate 2 and more.
• Card Games Panel - including Anthony Giovannetti of Slay the Spire, Martin Nerurkar of Nowhere Prophet and more.
• Dice & Probability in Game Design which includes Marlowe Dobbe of Dicey Dungeons and more.
• Plague Inc: Evolved with Designer James Vaughan

There's plenty of others lined up, like watching let's plays of Slay the Spire, Warhammer 40,000: Gladius and more with the actual developers. Sounds like it's going to be a fun event.

Valve mentioned in a PR that it will also have a Digital Tabletop Sale including downloadable demos and discounts on hundreds of card, board, and tabletop-adjacent titles on Steam.

See the event page here .