Currently in development by a father and son team, Harvest Days is another fresh 3D take on the casual farming-life RPG and it will be coming to Linux too.

There's quite a few of these appearing in the last year or two both 2D and 3D, many like this being directly inspired by the likes of Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, among others. Perhaps this one might catch your attention where others have not? It actually looks pretty darn charming.

You can find out more in their first development log video:

Watch video on YouTube.com

We spoke with Luis of the team Family Devs, who confirmed the game will be available for Linux. It's currently (as you can see above) in the early Alpha stages of development but it seems mighty promising especially with the big open world to travel around in.

Feature Highlight:

• Create and manage your farm. To grow your farm you must cultivate fruits and vegetables, take care of your beautiful animals or go deep into the forest to fish in its river.
• Explore an open world full of places for discover.Countless places are waiting to be discovered by you on Harvest Days: caves full of valuable minerals, a temple in ruins, a swamp with an abandoned treasure... and much more!
• Build relationships with villagers. Join the village community and make new friends. You can dialogue with them and decide the course of the conversation.
• Buy, sell or exchange products with the merchants. Thanks to commerce you can generate economic profits from the products you have obtained with agriculture, livestock and fishing. It is also possible to commerce with the resources you have collected on the map.
• Gather resources and craft your own tools and furniture. The open world of Harvest Days is full of resources to obtain: wood, rock, minerals, precious stones, magic mushrooms, berries...
• Move around the map with vehicles or horses. Ride on your horse and gallop into the mysterious forest to relax with the song of the birds... Although perhaps if you need to carry cargo, you should use one of the vehicles. You decide!
• The player is totally free about the decisions he makes and this will make each game unique since depending on how he interacts with other characters, his destiny will change.
• Unlike other farm-themed games Harvest Days includes RPG and Survival game features.

You can follow it on Steam and they also plan a Kickstarter campaign to launch this Summer.

Wine developer Zebediah Figura has sent in a proposal to work on a new Linux Kernel interface for Wine synchronization primitives, one that gets closer to performance and behaviour of Windows NT.

The basic idea is that the Wine team are "looking to introduce a kernel API that will allow us to implement Windows NT synchronization object API with at most one syscall per operation, and without managing object state in user managed shared memory, for the sake of performance". This might sound familiar if you follow Wine and Steam Play Proton closely, as it's part of what both esync and fsync were supposed to help with.

What's the deal? As Figura explained, modern games that need high performance make heavy use of multiple threads and synchronization primitives which Wine needs to work with in a way that's accurate and performs well. Both esync and fsync can give big boosts to performance of Windows games on Linux through Wine but it's mentioned that each also has big problems of their own.

Figura goes on to give a proposal of what the interface could look like, to gather feedback. Since this is in the very early stages, we're likely some time away from seeing it come to fruition.

The full post on the mailing list which goes into the deep details can be read 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

One of the features Google talked about early with Stadia is finally coming and that is State Share. Allowing players to share specific playable moments of captures and it's launching with HITMAN 3 . This is another tick in the box, finally, of nearly all the features promised by Google for Stadia well over a year after launch.

It sounds like a pretty fun system too, with the Stadia team saying it "turns a normal image or video capture into a portal to a unique game experience" and that "By embedding a game state within each capture, sharing gameplay for others to watch is transformed into a chance to try a playable slice of the game yourself. Each game state is defined by specific gameplay elements like player loadout, objectives, and difficulty, and trying each one is as easy as clicking a link".

Mechanically simple for actual users too which is the important part. Needing you to only capture a shot or video using Stadia's built-in features, allowing you to then (in supported games) turn it into a State Share link to send onto anyone else. From there, people with the link can then jump into the action at that moment if they own the game on Stadia. Each game will vary on what exactly it does.

For HITMAN 3 the Save State will allow:

• Mission starting location within the beginning of the level
• Mission objectives
• Player loadout (including weapon, gear, and clothing)
• Mission difficulty

State Share will be supported in HITMAN 3 as the first title on Stadia when it launches on January 20. The Stadia team expect more titles to support it through 2021.

By now you've probably heard either through us in our previous article or elsewhere that Valve are cooking something up to help Linux gaming even further. We have an idea on what one part of it is.

Valve already do quite a lot. There's the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer, the new container runtime feature to have Linux games both natively supported and Windows games in Proton run through a contained system to ensure compatibility, their work on Mesa drivers and much more.

In Valve's review of Steam in 2020 that we covered in the link above, one thing caught our eye and has been gaining attention. Valve mentioned for 2021 they will be "putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements" so what exactly does that mean? Well, a big part of that might have already been suggested directly.

Back in November 2019, the open source consulting firm Collabora presented an overview of the work they have been doing funded by Valve. Towards the end of the talk they mentioned ongoing work towards foolproof and fast instant upgrades of Linux systems. Collabora mentioned it could work for specialised systems like consoles or other systems where you don't expect users to be highly technical. Leading into that, a Valve developer posted on Reddit to clarify more details around this:

The image-based updater work is part of a set of efforts to attempt to improve the experience of trying out Linux on a normal PC with live USB media, and instantly updating said media from the other OS without losing user data. There's no "locking down" involved, as it can easily be disabled by the user to fall back to the normal package manager.

Linux has long been able to run directly from USB drives but what about the next stage of this evolution? That appears to be what Valve are hinting at in their 2020 review blog post.

Imagine if you will for a moment: a SteamOS-style USB stick, that's highly optimized for Linux gaming, with drivers ready to go and Steam pre-configured with everything it needs all direct from Valve and also this special update system to ensure it keeps on working. Now add in some pre-configured persistence so your games, files and so on stay on it and that sure sounds like a new way for users to get into and experience Linux gaming doesn't it? Steam Machines didn't work, so a way to properly experience Linux gaming in full on hardware people already own? That could certainly work.

That could be a much more interesting way to actually market and advertise Linux gaming too. It's not enough to have Linux distributions be fast and stable, and to have plenty of games available to play otherwise we would already be in a better position as a platform. The conversation changes with such an easy to use way to get involved. Burn it to a USB stick, load it on your PC and login to Steam, download a game and away you go — you're now gaming on Linux .

USB drives have been ridiculously cost effective in the last few years too, along with plenty of USB3 options now existing for the speed and you can get quite a lot of storage on them so it would be a pretty interesting move.

Over to you in the comments, what are your thoughts?

Well this is quite unusual. You've played monster catching games before but not like this. Familiars.io put a fresh spin on it all and it's quite ingenious.

Developed as a pixel-art retro-looking browser game, it's super accessible since you can play it on pretty much anything that can run some simple graphics in a browser window. It's an MMO too, so you can join up with others and chill out. When you want to, go off and catch some monsters, engage is some PvP and perhaps find a new favourite game waiting for you.

However, while it has a fun face there's a deep dark lurking inside it. These creatures can't be put into a special healing centre, oh no, once they reach 0 HP that's it – they're gone. Instead of you having permadeath like some roguelike, your creatures need their HP closely watched! That one twist is enough to set it apart from many other games doing a similar setting.

Familiars.io is currently under active development, with new content being added to it regularly. One of the most recent updates added in a pretty sweet feature: you have your own private resort. You can warp there whenever you want, and drop off up to 50 creatures to keep them out of harm's way. Nice little touch that.

It's also entirely free and you can play it on itch.io .

WRATH: Aeon of Ruin is a dark fantasy-horror FPS powered by the original Quake engine from publishers 3D Realms and 1C Entertainment and developer KillPixel Games.

The full release across all platforms (Windows currently supported in Early Access) has been delayed until "Summer 2021", this is due to COVID-19 as some of their team sadly caught it and needed recovery time. Even so, they've managed to push out a third content update.

“While delays are never ideal, we wanted to release one awesome final update before going heads down to knock this out of the park,” said Frederik Schreiber, Vice President of 3D Realms and Producer on WRATH. “Summer may seem far away, but we are working diligently to make WRATH the best game it can be.”

Watch video on YouTube.com

The good news is that direct Linux support is still planned, with 1C Publishing mentioning to us today that "The Linux version is planned for the full launch of the game in Summer.".

Until then you can either try with the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer, or perhaps even better is using the open source wrath-darkplaces game engine! The latter of which our contributor Samsai previewed in a previous article and it's looking really good.

You can buy WRATH: Aeon of Ruin from Humble Store , GOG and Steam .

Rocket Shipment is a tricky, physics based, space delivery game. The game is a love letter to the old style lander games like Thrust, Solar Jetman and Crazy Gravity. After being in development for two years now, it has entered Early Access on Steam and will remain there until closer to the end of 2021 when the full content gets added in.

It's simple and right to the point, keeping the game mechanics nicely glued together. The main mechanic is using a physics based grappling cable to move packages and other object around, while managing your fuel levels. There's also a built in level editor, and Steam Workshop support to upload and download extra levels.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Speaking about the release, the developer Chocolate Pinecone mentioned this:

I embarked on a huge journey when starting to make this game in August 2018. My goal was to make something completely from scratch in a language I had not mastered yet. No usage of fancy existing game engines, just pure C++ code and a few libraries.

Was it worth it? Definitely! Even though it will probably not be a huge financial success, I have learned so much that will help me with future projects and the support I got was amazing.

You can find Rocket Shipment on Steam in Early Access.

We know that Source 2 from Valve is a pretty capable game engine, and we've seen what they've been able to do with it over the years (and Half-Life: Alyx turned it up a notch) but what's next? Ray Tracing perhaps.

It's not a whole lot to go on but Artifact, the card-game failure from Valve that's currently going through a complete overhaul continues to be upgraded and SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik spotted something interesting that they posted up on Twitter :

What they found mentions "Raytracing Shader" and "RTX", which is pretty damn clear. The full link to all the new bits mentions plenty of other things too including Vulkan API additions.

To what end though? Where will this be going into Valve games? It doesn't really seem like a fit for Artifact, and the constant rumours of CS:GO moving over to Source 2 probably still wouldn't give it Ray Tracing either since it's a highly competitive game and it needs a level playing field. Then again, it would still be thoroughly interesting to see in action no matter what.

So what do you think this could be for? Perhaps just as a side-effect of Artifact developers pulling in newer code over all Source 2 updates, that Valve are working on overall to be available somewhere else? Half-Life: Alyx already looked pretty fantastic (from footage I've seen, no VR kit here), imagine how that would look with Ray Tracing added in.