We're now firmly ensconced in the second decade of Star Citizen 's crowdfunding-driven development . And while backers can currently play a minimally functional alpha version (that's still missing many promised features ), there's still no sign of even a fully playable beta version in sight.

Don't worry, though—that state of affairs hasn't stopped developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) from finding new and interesting ways for the game to break.

Star Citizen 's current problems revolve around this week's rollout of the Alpha 3.18 "Lasting Legacies" update , which RSI is selling as "the biggest Star Citizen update yet ."

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 .

Defold , a free game engine with the source code available under a reasonable open license has released a roadmap for 2021 and it's sounding pretty good.

While not actually open source, the licensing terms are still quite friendly and still far better than some other much more closed licensing like with Unity, Unreal and Game Maker but not as open as something like Godot. Defold is progressing on though and their roadmap for 2021 mentions their plan to continue to improve their Linux support.

Under the Platforms heading on their roadmap was this:

Editor on Linux

The Defold editor runs well on Linux but there are a few pain points and problems related to Linux distributions, window managers and graphics drivers. This year we plan to invest time in order to fix at least some of these issues.

Nice to see their developers are not only paying attention to reports but actually want to do better. Their roadmap is also up on GitHub so anyone interested can directly follow various support tickets and feature requests to see how it's doing.

Much more changes are planned too like pulling out their 2D skeletal animation Spine code and the Box 2D / Bullet physics systems and putting them into extensions. Currently both are tightly integrated and limited in how they can push them further, so having them as extensions will allow a lot more flexibility for both game developers and the people working on Defold directly.

They're also working on multiple features to improve performance of games built with Defold like object culling which developers need to do manually right now, improved texture compression, reducing draw calls for sprites and much more.

Sounds like 2021 is going to be big for Defold.

Here's another developer interview for you! This time we chatted with Decemberborn Interactive about their game Cathedral.

GOL: First of all, can you introduce yourself and your studio?

"My name is Eric Lavesson, and I'm the lead developer of a Swedish game development studio called Decemberborn Interactive. We're a small company, consisting of three people working with a few talented freelancers. The three of us work together at another company as well for our day jobs, and spend some evenings, weekends and various spare time working on games under the Decemberborn banner.

I started the company in December 2014 (So, the company was "born in December". Coming up with company names might not be my forté). To date, we've released one game, which is called Cathedral. It was in development for about 5 years (part-time) and we released it on Linux, OSX and Windows in October 2019."

GOL: How did you get into making video games?

"I've always been interested in writing my own games; It’s a long and weird story which has followed me through all my computers, consoles and programming languages that I’ve dabbled in over the years. When I was 9 years old, my parents had an Atari 600XL. It came with a binder full of programming examples in BASIC which I happily typed in to see what happened. I made my first (extremely crude and unfun) text adventures back then. A few years later, I got an Atari ST, where I dabbled a bit with Motorola 68k assembler. I modified existing examples that I got my hands on through magazines and shareware floppy disks, but ultimately it was a bit too much for me at that age. Later, I got a hold of STOS - an implementation of BASIC made just for games! I created a few really simple platformers and demos with this and had a lot of fun throughout the years. Even later, when my Atari got switched out for a PC, I continued games in QBasic for a while and switched more and more into C (and later C++) and assembly in DOS, where things got way more interesting. All of this of course became even more exciting when you started getting access to OpenGL and DirectX a few years down the line.

Long story short; all of this drove me towards a career in software development, and even though I ended up specializing in rendering and visualization in my dayjob, I never actually released a game until Cathedral. Games and game programming has always been a huge positive part of my life, but releasing a game was just a distant dream for a long time. At one point I felt like I needed to rectify that and get something out there, which is when Decemberborn was created. I also had the luck of meeting people with the same mindset that I could collaborate with."

GOL: Your first title, Cathedral, released back in October 2019 - tell us a little about the game

"Cathedral is ultimately an NES-styled adventure game, inspired a lot by Metroid and similar games (so a Metroidvania, if you will). In depth, it’s essentially stuff that I loved from a bunch of games, both old and new ones, put together into one game. There’s inspiration from a ton of NES games such as Wizard & Warriors, Zelda II, Metroid, Simon’s Quest and so many more, but also from various games on other platforms such as the Wonder Boy series. I could most likely list inspirations that we drew on for quite some time, but ultimately I think what all of these games have in common is that there’s a sense of adventure in them. You’re on an adventure, figuring things out as you go, unveiling a world, one layer at a time. And I think that’s the essence that we wanted to capture in Cathedral as well."

Watch video on YouTube.com

GOL: How did the release go overall, how did you find the reception to it? What valuable lessons have you learned about it?

"The release went well. We had a simultaneous release on Steam and GOG across all platforms (Linux, OSX, Windows). We patched the game fairly often the first week due to some minor bugs, but I don’t think we encountered anything huge or way too unsettling.

The reception has been very positive so far! Some of the initial player feedback encouraged us to slightly redesign and add some rooms and items to avoid unnecessary backtracking. So far, people seem to enjoy it, which makes me happy!"

GOL: How has the split been across the different platforms (Linux, macOS, Windows) for your sales of Cathedral?

"Windows is by all accounts the largest platform, taking almost all of the sales. Linux is sadly less than 2% of the sales, with OSX being only slightly stronger. The good news is that this won’t affect any future decisions for us to release on Linux in any way at all, since we do all of our development on Linux machines. We’ll always want to release for as many platforms as possible, but Linux is our main development platform, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon."

GOL: What has been the most challenging part of developing and releasing Cathedral?

"You’ll probably get different answers depending on who you ask in the team, and I don’t know if this is the type of answer you’re expecting, but for me I’d have to say the psychological stress that I put on myself developing the game. This project became extremely personal for me. I put my soul into creating both the engine and the game, and not always in a healthy way. Cathedral was too easy for me to get consumed by; For long periods of time, I didn’t sleep enough, I didn’t eat regularly and I could literally sit in front of the computer from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep. Long-term, this puts a lot of stress on both your body and your mind, and it reached a point where it simply didn’t work anymore, and pretty much all development halted for a long period of time.

Setting up a company, building custom engines, learning how the Steam and GOG SDKs work. All of these are more or less complex things, but they can be broken down, understood and solved one step at a time. If there’s anything that ever actually truly threatened the development of the game, it was my mental state. I could talk A LOT about mental health in software projects, but ultimately, taking care of yourself should be a priority."

GOL: As we understand, Cathedral was developed on Linux, could you tell us about your workflow on this? How does it compare to developing on Windows?

"When it comes to programming languages, pretty much no difference at all except the platform-specific abstractions. As long as you avoid platform-specific code in the wrong places, you should be good. The BIG difference will be the tools available, and I think it comes down to what you prefer to work with.

Regarding programming language: We wrote our engine in C++ and made it as portable as possible. We have the same codebase with platform abstractions in some places (such as filesystem access, for instance). These are mostly things you need to consider when porting to consoles anyway, so developing one Linux and building something that should also work on Windows and OSX helped prepare for that.

Regarding tools: My entirely personal take on this is that everything just feels less clunky on Linux. I have a fairly lightweight IDE, and I have a powerful terminal where I can express pretty much anything I need within a matter of seconds. And if it’s something longer I’ll just put it in a shell script. It’s awesome and I love it.

While working on console ports, we did have to switch over to Windows because of some SDKs and tools not being supported on Linux. And I honestly missed Linux every second I worked in Windows. I don’t know how many times I accidentally opened up a command prompt and accidentally tried to execute a bash script, or pipe the output from grep somewhere, and so on…

I’m sure this comes down to preference and how used you are to the tools you have at your disposal, but the toolchains that are available to me in Linux just feels like home, and I know how to utilize them well."

GOL: Any advice for developers getting into making and releasing their first game?

"I’ve had the feeling that I’ve been guessing all the way on how to handle things, since I’ve never released a game before, so I might be the wrong person to ask, but this is probably what I can think of:

• Take care of yourself, physically and mentally (I can’t stress this enough!)
• Don’t sit on your own ideas and try to perfect them. Try them out, ask people what they think. Have people play your game as early as possible, even if initially just friends and family. You’d be surprised how people play your game, and how you might want to change the design to take that into account.
• Share stuff and be active. Show pictures, videos, gameplay. Doesn’t have to be on social media - show a friend or a coworker, or post on a gamedev forum. Whatever works.
• Ask questions on forums. Ask for opinions and ideas. I sucked at this for the longest time, thinking that what I was working on wasn’t really worth showing off just yet. You’d be surprised over how willing complete strangers are to help you become better at both game design and programming! And, if you get the chance, help someone back :)
• If you have a choice, don’t go at it alone. It’s so much better to be two persons (or more), especially when brainstorming ideas, but also for moral support when things get tough."

GOL: What’s next for Decemberborn Interactive?

"Lately, we’ve been porting Cathedral to the Nintendo Switch. We’re currently working with Elden Pixels (the devs that created Alwa’s Awakening and Alwa’s Legacy) as our publishers to bring the game to the Switch, which is scheduled to happen very soon.

Apart from that, we’re actually building a completely new game engine, based loosely on the engine we wrote for Cathedral, incorporating all the things we learned along the way. It’s at the point where it’s mature enough to build prototypes in, and that’s exactly what we are doing. We have a few different ideas that we want to explore for our next game. It’ll take some time before we have anything to announce, but rest assured that it’ll have day 1 Linux support!"

You can buy Cathedral for Linux on GOG and Steam .

Want to see more of our interviews? All our article tags lead to a dedicated page. Check out the interviews here .

The Machinery, an upcoming game engine from people who previously worked on the likes of Stingray, Bitsquid, and Diesel engines released a new build with the first Preview of Linux support.

Joining the ranks of many game engines to offer it including Defold, Godot Engine, Unity, Unreal, Ren'Py and a great many more that would take too long to list. The team behind The Machinery certainly know what they're doing, given their previous work like Bitsquid / Stingray was used for some big games like Helldivers and Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide and more.

It's currently in Open Beta with the January 2021 (version 2021.1) going live that adds in (amongst other things) support for Linux in a Preview state.

Unlike other game engines, The Machinery seems to be selling itself on developers who want a ton of configuration. The developers mention about how it's "completely plugin-based" so you pick and choose all the parts of it you want to extend the editor and the engine as you see fit.

For the Linux release, the developer showed off how to get quickly and up and running keeping in mind this is the first public Linux release so it's nowhere near finished.

Watch video on YouTube.com

As for licensing, it doesn't appear to be open source and their website has no clear licensing information I could find. Use of the Beta needs you to agree to an EULA.

Highlights of the new release include:

• Linux Support (Preview) — The Machinery now runs on Linux.
• Bindless GPU Resource Management — Better performance in Vulkan backend.
• Raytracing Support (Preview) — Preview of our raytracing APIs.
• Asset Labels — Tag assets for better organization.

See more on their website .

For a more thorough introduction to it, you can see their previous older video:

Looking to make games? Defold is a pretty great option that has wonderful cross-platform support and it's free too, available under a pretty open license (but not open source).

With an editor that's available across Linux, macOS and Windows so you can develop anywhere you like. It can also export games to all three and HTML5, Android and iOS as well. A fully featured game engine, with the source code available to view if needed.

"Defold is a completely free to use game engine for development of desktop, mobile and web games. There are no up-front costs, no licensing fees and no royalties. The source code is made available on GitHub with a developer-friendly license. The Defold editor runs on Windows, Linux and macOS and includes a code editor, debugger, profiler and advanced scene and UI editors. Game logic is written in Lua with the option to use native code to extend the engine with additional functionality. Defold is used by a growing number of developers to create commercial hits as well as games for game jams and in schools to teach game development. Defold is known for its ease of use and it is praised for its technical documentation and friendly community of developers."

Pictured - Defold running nicely on Linux

Quite a capable game engine that mainly targets 2D games with support for OpenGL, Vulkan and Metal. It has fully scriptable rendering pipelines with low-level access, a particle effects editor, 2D and 3D particle effects, spine models, a tile editor, a full extension system, Lua scripting and Haxe support, 2D and 3D physics (Box 2D and Bullet) fully integrated and much more.

It's been around for a long time and now with it on Steam, perhaps more developer will take a look. What games have been made with it? Some more recent commercial indie game releases include Fates of Ort, Interrogation and Faerie Solitaire Harvest.

Find it now on Steam and see more on the official site .

LDtk (prev called LEd) is an in-development free and open source level editor, one that's modern and designed to be as user-friendly as possible designed by a former dev on Dead Cells.

A big release just went out out with the 0.7.0 version, which the developer explained has "many important changes to make LDtk production ready and future proof . These changes will allow better support for large projects, better API creation and maintenance, and smoother user adoption".

Some of the bigger changes in this release include a new home layout, which is designed to focus on "what's really important". You can also now enable LDtk to separate level files to have one main project JSON file, and then one per level which sounds like a good features to prevent ending up with unreadably long files.

For game developers and anyone tinkering with level design, you can also now avoid JSON with an option to export all supported layers as PNG images. That might even be useful for just quickly showing off your work to someone. Speaking of images, each level can now have a custom background image too.

Backups! That's now a thing too, with LDtk making backups of your project when saving in case of issues.

Making LDtk even more useful, you can now have an LDtk project supported and loaded up with the open source and cross-platform HaxeFlixel thanks to a new official LDtk Haxe API. There's more to the release than all that, so be sure to check over the full changelog.

You can download LDtk 0.7.0 from GitHub , for Linux select the Ubuntu download which gives an AppImage that should run fine across any distribution. Also read more about it on the official site .

Game Maker and later GameMaker Studio is a very popular game engine with indie developers and YoYo Games just recently sold it off and it appears they did so at a loss.

Originally created by Mark Overmars, who later teamed up with YoYo Games who have carried it on since 2007. Later in 2015 the YoYo Games studio was acquired by Playtech for around $16.4 million dollars. News doing the rounds now though, is that Playtech have actually sold YoYo Games to an unnamed buyer:

Playtech has previously stated that it is a strategic focus of the Company to simplify its business and dispose of non-core assets. It is pleased to announce that it has now completed the sale of YoYo Games, part of the discontinued Casual and Social Gaming business, for a consideration of approximately USD 10 million. With the completion of the sale of YoYo Games, Playtech has now disposed of all its Casual and Social Gaming assets.

So they not only sold it for less than they originally purchased it for but the buyer has yet to be formally announced, even with that financial statement being released a week ago. Not just that though, for an entire game engine and company that's a tiny amount of money - which should ring some alarm bells.

Clever people from the official YoYo Games forum already found who might now own them, thanks to the UK Company House records system we can see that multiple people involved in the Opera browser company now sit as directors of YoYo Games. These records appeared the day after the Playtech statement.

For game developers, the game engine you rely on suddenly changing hands with no prior notice and no announcement a week later must be a little frightening. Games often take multiple years to create, so for developers well into the thick of using GameMaker Studio hopefully the result will be a good one. Perhaps though, the time is ripe to check out Godot Engine since it's free and open source.

We reached out to YoYo Games for a statement yesterday, will update if they reply.

A lot of game developer still worry about being more open with their code but it seems Terry Cavanagh (VVVVVV, Super Hexagon, Dicey Dungeons) believes it was worth it.

There are certain legitimate reasons to worry about going all-in with open source, but we're not here to debate that. Plenty of developers have warmed up to the idea of open source over the last few years, with Cavanagh now being amongst them. Cavanagh opened up the source code to their puzzle-platformer VVVVVV back in early 2020 .

Now on the 11th anniversary of VVVVVV's launch, Cavanagh has a fresh blog post up to go over a previous Game Jam but they also gave some thoughts on the source code drop too. It's worth pointing out though, the code is open but not under a proper OSI-approved open source license. It's certainly a good step though!

So what happened? Well they accepted and merged over 400 pull requests from the community, which will result in a big new release of the game later this year. They got a port to the Dreamcast, the Haiku operating system and there's also a webassembly port now too.

Summing up their thoughts on opening the code, Cavanagh said "So, I guess for other game developers thinking about doing this, here’s a data point! Only good things have happened. This whole thing has been a really positive experience, and I’m really glad I did it.".

Nice to see such a healthy experience!