Oddventure is a crazy turn-based RPG about the misadventures of Charlie, a girl trapped in a cursed fairy-tale world.

We previously covered the launch of the Kickstarter, which at the time did not have a Linux build of the demo available. After asking the developer, they promptly put one up. As it turns out, it's using the open source Godot Engine too which we weren't aware of before! Wonderful to see more excellent looking games use it.

"Oddventure is a JRPG about the misadventures of Charlie - a nihilistic and rebellious teenage girl with anger issues and social awkwardness. Charlie searches for her troublesome brother Bonzo and ultimately for a way back home. The setting is the Kingdom of Luxia, a land straight from original Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales with a dark, Nietzschean twist."

Watch video on YouTube.com

One note: currently it seems the battle UI doesn't like the gamepad action button, so you need to use keyboard Spacebar. The developer has been made aware of this.

After playing the demo, I'm absolutely sold and decided to back it personally. It has some good quirky dark humour and an excellent style. Very intrigued to see the full game and I expect this to absolutely be a big hit when it releases in full later in 2022.

You can fund it on Kickstarter and follow on Steam . Download the new Linux demo from itch.io or Game Jolt .

Since it has already hit the goal, we've added it to our Crowdfunding Page .

Learn more about the free and open source Godot Engine during Go Godot Jam, part of the Godot Gamedev Festival running from today May 6 through to June 9.

Sounds like a fun idea to help show off Godot to even more people. It's packed full of "one month of quality streams and a game jam aimed at celebrating and expanding a vibrant Godot community" and it's entirely open to everyone as this is a free online event. They will be hosting all sorts of panels:

• Showcases of the use-cases, workflows, and features of Godot
• Comparisons of Godot with other game engines to debunk myths
• Tutorials to help beginners get started with gamedev on Godot

See more on the official site .

Office Point Rescue Deja Vu is a brand new retro-themed first-person shooter from Magellanic Games, a bigger expanded version of the original from 2020.

"Terrorists have invaded and taken hostages in the Emeraldalo Corporation's headquaters.  Agent Foldon is assigned to infiltrate the building, dispatch the terrorists, rescue any surviving hostages and gather intel."

Check out our gameplay footage below to get a taste of it. The gameplay was on Easy mode, as I didn't want to spoil any surprises and difficult in the other modes. It gives you a good idea of what to expect though, thoroughly reminding me of some retro arcade shooters that took way too many coins.

Features:

• 11 levels spread across 2 routes.  Navigate the office building, finding secrets and rescuing survivors.
• Utilise 4 weapons to fight back foes - pistol, shotgun, sub-machine gun and the mighty lightgun.
• Choose from 3 tuned difficulties.
• Save your progress.  Return to the last level you reached with all your items, guns and ammo.  No need to play through in a single sitting.
• 2 Additional unlockable modes - Giant Head Mode and Lightgun Mode
• Switchable graphics mode, enjoy in the original low-resolution mode or in clear, crisp high resolution.
• Full retro midi-like soundtrack.

Find it free on itch.io . While free, you can donate to the developer when you go to download it if you feel their work is worth supporting.

Bittersweet Birthday is an upcoming action game set inside a mysterious building. You wake up dazed and confused, there's people after you but someone is trying to help you escape. An interesting setting full of intrigue, with each fight being a unique combat encounter.

"Bittersweet Birthday is an action game where every combat encounter is a challenging and unique fight. You can also explore different areas and help many of the NPC populating them with their everyday struggles while learning more about the world and its history."

A demo was released in late December, check out the trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Feature Highlight:

• A story of mystery driven by endearing characters!
• Explore a lively village with friendly residents and their interlocking quests!
• Punishing combat where reading the enemy is the key to victory!
• A darts mini-game! Well, at least darts are being used...
• Cute pixel-art characters on beautifully drawn backgrounds!
• Fully re-mappable input and support for PS4, Xbox and PC controllers!
• From 30 minutes to an hour and half of gameplay!

The features included will be expanding and changing over time of course, as this is only a demo. An impressive demo though, with a great atmosphere and game feel. Playing the demo on Linux was great! Can really see what they're going for here and it made me want more. Probably one of the most remarkable demos I've seen for a while.

Going to be one we're going to need to keep up high on our watch list. Being made with Godot Engine too, so it's great to see more there too.

Find it on itch.io .

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 .

The Godot team just keep on adding in big new features to make this one of the best free and open source game engines around and the next Beta update for Godot 3.2.4 is out now.

Here's the main list of what's new overall for Godot 3.2.4:

• Android App Bundle and subview embedding support.
• 2D batching for GLES3 (it was implemented for GLES2 in 3.2.2), and improvements to GLES2's batching.
• A new software skinning for MeshInstance to replace the slow GPU skinning on devices that don't support the fast GPU skinning (especially mobile).
• Rewritten and greatly improved FBX importer .
• Improved Web editor prototype and AudioWorklet support for multithreaded HTML5 builds .
• New option to snap 2D transforms to whole coordinates , helps prevent jitter on pixel art camera motions.
• Configurable amount of lights per object , now defaulting to 32 instead of 8.
• macOS ARM64 support in official binaries for Apple M1 chip (only classical build for now).
• Optional GDNative support for HTML5 .
• MP3 loading and playback support .
• WebXR support for VR games .
• Minimap support in GraphEdit .
• Fixes to Mono on WebAssembly .
• New CPU lightmapper (new in beta 6).
• New dynamic BVH for rendering and the GodotPhysics backends (new in beta 6).
• Multiple fixes to one-way collisions (new in beta 6).
• New AspectRatioContainer Control node (new in beta 6).

While their main focus is on the much bigger upcoming Godot 4 which has a big rendering overhaul and Vulkan API support, they're clearly not done here. Project Manager Rémi Verschelde mentions how there's "even more in the works that will be included in future beta builds". Full info here .

In other somewhat recent Godot news, the team recently blogged about their work on a glTF 2.0 scene exporter. What is glTF? A royalty-free specification for the efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models by engines and applications, overseen by The Khronos Group (the same behind OpenGL, Vulkan and so on). Godot has been able to import glTF for some time now but the option to export it from Godot enables developers to quickly put it back into something like Blender, to make any changes needed to then bring the updates back into Godot. All very useful sounding.

Also if you missed it, be sure to check out their 2020 overview video. The progress is outstanding:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Starting off as nothing but a tiny little cell in a massive world, Thrive is a free and open source evolution sim backed up by the power of science.

Quite early on in development still overall, it is however very playable already and you can have a little fun exploring and eating away at various resources to evolve your creature. It's like a much more detailed version of EA's Spore (in the early game stage). Now powered by Godot Engine , their progress on it seems to be speeding up.

Thrive 0.5.3 is up now and it brings with it numerous improvements to the flow of things like key rebinds, translation support, a process panel to show running processes in your cell, big improvements to the save game system, you can pan the camera in the editor now, music fade improvements, tips on the loading screen, plus lots of bug fixes to make it a lot smoother.

Check out their latest release trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Work is already well underway for the next version, which will have a fancy new binding agents feature which wasn't quite ready for this version. Once that's ready, the next release will go up with that and whatever else they've done. They're also working on thermoplasts, 3D stages and absolutely loads more that sounds exciting for an evolution sim.

You can follow it on the official site and GitHub . It's free and open source. They also take donations to their Patreon , where if they manage to hit an additional £100 per month one of their team will be able to actually work dedicated part-time on it which would be great to see hit.

Godot Engine is probably the most promising free and open source game engine around, and they clearly had a very productive 2020 with big plans for 2021.

Just before the year was up, and as we took our holiday break, developer Fabio Alessandrelli wrote up about the ongoing and impressive progress on the Web Editor and the HTML5 export. The progress on it has been somewhat mind-blowing with it now having GDNative supported with HTML5 exports from Godot, and the web editor itself has now hit what they say is the Beta stage and you can try it out at this new temporary address .

For the web editor, they're looking to keep it up to date and in sync with the latest work on Godot 3.2.4.

Pictured - me testing out the Godot Engine Web Editor

The Godot Engine team have made huge progress elsewhere too. While work continues on the current stable branch, with Godot 3.2.4 due out properly sometime soon that brings in some big stuff like 2D batching for GLES3 for better performance, a greatly improved FBX importer, a configurable amount of lights per object and so on the work also continues on Godot 4 with Vulkan API support too.

So much is going on they created a thoroughly impressive showcase video of Godot's 2020. Have a look below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Scrabdackle is one game you really need to keep an eye on, an adventure following a novice wizard getting to know their own strange world for the first time.

Made in the awesome free and open source game engine Godot Engine, it's a 2D top-down hand-drawn action-adventure that focuses on exploration and combat. With some quirky humour, fun scribbly-line artwork that's super charming it's already got a lot to love about it.

Check out the original trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Currently you can try out the free demo on itch.io which we wrote about back in September . Since then, the developer has put up a huge upgrade to the demo which expanded the content quite a lot. Some of what's new includes a fully developed village, a brand new hint feature, revamped conversations with a lot more personality, a more dynamic dialogue system and lots more little tech improvements. In terms of gameplay, it might not have a lot that's new but it looks and feels like a nice improvement and a good show of what's to come from the full game.

It also serves as a good reminder to try it out, and follow it along as it's coming to Kickstarter in 2021 and could end up being one of the most promising indie games next year. Do give it a go.

Try the demo on itch.io now.