Confirmed to be launching with Linux support, and it will be free to play in some form, Projekt Z from 314 Arts impressed us in the first dev video and they're back to show off more progress.

What exactly is it? A co-op Zombie survival FPS set during the end of World War 2, which takes place on a secret German island that you and your team crashed on. They're trying to combine a mixture of casual and hardcore elements together, somewhat inspired by parts of Left 4 Dead with different characters.

Check out their second development log video below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

The more realistic- ish take on it compared with the likes of Left 4 Dead, along with the survival elements make Projekt Z sound overall quite exciting. Having a special hub area to build up in between missions sounds great, and their attention to all the little details is pretty impressive for a small team. Dead players body turning into an AI zombie is quite a nice touch too.

You can follow it on the official site .

Two Scoop Games are currently developing Kick Bot, a tough-as-nails precision platformer that currently has a demo in the Steam Game Festival: Autumn Edition, so we had a chat about it.

It's always good to find out a little more about what goes on behind the scenes, especially for games that offer full Linux support, so we can gain a little nugget of info on how people make their games and so it's great to have Alex and Eric from Two Scoop Games available for a chat.

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

Alex : "Hi I’m Alex Bezuska, I do game design, art, and animation for Kick Bot"

Eric : "I’m Eric Lathrop, and I do programming, game design, and level design for Kick Bot.

GOL: How did you get into game development? What has inspired you with game development and Kick Bot itself?

Alex : "I have wanted to make video games since my first game console, the Super Nintendo. I have been drawing all my life and got into animation with Flash in high school. I started taking my dream seriously in 2012 after watching Indie Game: The Movie and realizing that there were small teams of one or two people making really cool games. I started teaching myself JavaScript that night and eventually started a local JavaScript user group where I met Eric, who was also dabbling in game development. I offered to make art for his game, we later formed our studio Two Scoop Games and 6 years later we are still going."

Eric : "I started making games around 10 years old. I had an old luggable orange-screen computer hand-me-down from my uncle which had a BASICA floppy. I made little Q&A games and text adventure games at first, then later I graduated to QBASIC on a 386 and started making more traditional games with graphics. I just never stopped."

Alex : "As for what Inspired Kick Bot; it started as a 48-hour game jam back in 2014 where the goal was to make a game as simple and frustrating as Flappy Bird, we boiled our concept down to one mechanic; wall-jumping, inspired by games in the 16-bit era that featured wall-jumping, for me Mega Man X, and for Eric Super Metroid. The controls were simple - two buttons to jump left or jump right. That was the original Kick Bot (Classic) we put out free on the web. Kick Bot (Classic) was featured on the Chrome Web Store and was our most played game peaking at 70,000 weekly active users but it was totally free with no ads so we never made a penny.

The new Kick Bot you see on Steam today is a reimagining of that game with the 6 years of experience we now have, targeted to PC and consoles this time. Instead of an infinite runner it is a traditional precision platformer with loads of touch-as-nails hand-crafted levels. The way you control Kick Bot is still the same – TWO BUTTONS; jump left, and jump right, but now you can slide, dash, and butt-stomp as well."

GOL: What really sets Kick Bot apart from other precision platformers? Why should someone pick your game?

Eric : "Kick Bot uses only two buttons, so it has a really low barrier to entry. It’s challenging, but fair and rewarding. It’s kinetic, with quick respawns that keep you in a flow state where you’re always in the action."

Watch video on YouTube.com

Kick Bot is a two-button, fast-paced precision platformer that takes place inside a GIANT ROBOT LEG ON THE MOON!

GOL: What would you say has been the most challenging part of making Kick Bot?

Alex : "The most challenging part of making Kick Bot for me is getting the word out that the game exists. We have a ton of fun in development and the ideas come easy for us when riffing off of each other and our love of classic games. We do a lot of playtesting and refining and people we get to try Kick Bot really seem to like it, so our big challenge now is just getting it in front of enough people to make game development a sustainable career for us."

Eric : "For me, this is the first game I’ve made that has a lot of handcrafted content. Most of the other games I’ve made used procedural generation to create levels. For Kick Bot we wanted everything to feel really cohesive and polished so we decided to produce everything manually. It’s been challenging to pull levels out of thin air, but we’ve tried to invent a process to give us a seed of inspiration so we’re not starting off with a blank screen."

GOL: You mentioned to us that you developed Kick Bot on Linux, could you tell us a little about your workflow and the tools you use to make it?

Alex : "I will defer to Eric, the Linux guru and he can talk about Vim or something nerdy :)"

Eric : "I’ve been a Linux user since I had to Red Hat Linux 6 off of a bunch of floppies. When Alex and I were looking for a new game engine we found that Unity had a Linux beta. I installed it and found it as stable as the Windows version my friends used. The only tweaking I’ve done was to integrate Vim and Tmux with it so files would open in my terminal for editing. (See https://gitlab.com/ericlathrop/dotfiles/-/blob/master/bin/unity-vim.sh and https://gitlab.com/ericlathrop/dotfiles/-/blob/master/bin/vimuxterm )

I’ve been able to export working Windows builds from Linux without ever booting Windows."

GOL: For game development on Linux, is there anything big that’s missing right now, how could Linux game development be made better?

Eric : "At the indie level, I think Linux has most of the tools you’d need. Blender, Krita, Inkscape, Audacity, Aseprite, Tiled, Unity. Getting builds onto Steam and Itch works fine. The only things I couldn’t get working on Linux were VR and AR development. I’ve heard that tooling for music composition is lacking, but I don’t know much about that."

GOL: What are your plans once Kick Bot has released?

Alex : "We were told by an interviewer on a podcast this week that he would buy our game at launch and we had to use the money to buy ourselves each two scoops of ice cream, that’s my first goal (not joking). If Kick Bot gets popular enough to justify it I would totally be into doing DLC for more levels or additional modes. As for the next game; I would love to explore a game prototype we have already started called PullPals, where you stretch and fling cute monster babies to solve puzzles. PullPals is totally different from Kick Bot but I think it could be great if we put some time into it."

Eric : "I’d like to take some time to make some more prototypes and jam games. We’re a lot better at Unity now than when we started so we should be able to spin up new projects more easily. But also, once it’s safe to travel again I want to visit Costa Rica to see all the different kinds of hummingbirds they have."

Alex : "Thanks so much for interviewing us, we are excited to be releasing Kick Bot on Linux via Steam and Itch, it’s nice to support the Linux community and we are sure it works because half our team uses Linux!"

Eric : "Thanks for talking to us, it’s great to have a Linux-focused gaming news source out there."

You can try the demo right now on Steam .

Drive funny little trucks across difficult tracks using only your mouse in Frick, Inc. which is out now with Linux support, plus you get some free game assets as an extra. Created by developer Kenney , known for producing high-quality game assets for the public domain, as well as plenty you can purchase directly and the Asset Forge application to create models, this is actually their first solo commercial game.

Trailer below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

I've played through a bunch of it and it's seriously great. For the price of a coffee, what you end up with is a thoroughly enjoyable driving puzzle game with a simple and very clever idea.

As the name suggests, it's amusingly frustrating at times but not punishing, just challenging to get everything right. Flick switches, pull down levers and slide around corners as you try to stick to the track. It's nowhere near as easy as it might seem. Due to the mechanics, it's pretty hilarious. Having to watch both the vehicle on the track and your mouse movements around a control panel that changes across the levels is brilliant. I completely lost count of how many times I drove straight off the track, especially when you get to switch between vehicles and you forget to turn off the previous one and you make a mad dash between them pressing buttons and pulling more levers. It ends up a little frantic.

Once you get the basics down, it became a little too easy to become a bit too overconfident and end up screwing up in some great ways. It's as much a driving puzzler, as it is a game of how spectacularly you can fail or succeed in a really short amount of time.

Feature Highlight:

• Easy to learn, hard to master – You'll be switching between trucks (and control methods) in 30 levels to perform various tasks.
• Extra challenge in each level – Each of the levels contains an extra challenge, only for those daring enough to go the extra mile.
• Includes game assets – Ready to get into game development? Use the included 3D models to create your own game inspired by Frick, Inc.

It's available exclusively on itch.io for $3.99 with support for Linux and Windows.

This is brilliant! Unity Technologies creators of the Unity game engine, which is ridiculously popular with indie developers, have started a series of open source game development projects.

With this idea they're hoping to pull together people as part of Unity’s first open-source game development program. Part of the reason is due to the ongoing COVID19 pandemic, with people often unable to meet and miss out on vital experience and team work. So, why not work together online to build something? That's the plan here. Not only that though, it's an opportunity to see how game development can work out in the open from all sides - using the Unity game engine as the base for it all.

The first project is an action-adventure game, and anyone can jump in to help with code, graphics, audio, or any kind of asset and it's up on GitHub right now.

See their video explainer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Hopefully a few Linux developers will hop in and make sure this open source project runs nicely on Linux, enabling other developers to learn from too. You never know…this could even turn out to be something seriously fun. They're hoping that they can have this first game done by March 2021.

See their full blog post here .

Inspired in parts by Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and Puyo Puyo Tetris with its own unique spin on block-matching battles, Aloof has a demo up now.

What's interesting about Aloof, is that the blocks don't fall by themselves. You're not racing to find a position against a timer. You can move them down, to the side and back up to position them exactly where you want them. The developer said it's all about keeping up with your opponent, taking your time and thinking about what you're doing.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Available now so it's ready and waiting for the soon to arrive Steam Game Festival: Autumn Edition which begins on October 7. It's quite a fully featured demo too with single-player, online play which is cross-platform for Linux / macOS and Windows plus there's even local multiplayer too.

Once released in full they're planning to have a full solo / co-op campaign along with matches versus an AI player, special rescue mission levels and boss battles too. From my own time spent in the demo, it has an absolutely wonderful atmosphere and it's really quite charming. For a block-matching battler, it looks like it's going to be great.

You can try it out on Steam .

Space, sci-fi and farming - what more could you want? One Lonely Outpost is like Stardew Valley for fans who want something a little bit more out there.

The Kickstarter campaign which is now over ended on $123,195 pledged so there's clearly a lot of interest and that was way more than their $80,000 initial goal. Linux support is confirmed, and is listed very clearly for it too.

Here's it's not just about the farming. There's plenty of that though, set on a barren alien world that you need to bring back to life and as you do a community will grow around it. Exploration is a big part of it too, it's not Earth after all and despite the planet being devoid of life there is oxygen and running water…from who? It will be interesting to find out.

Watch video on YouTube.com

It's not all farming and strange ruins though, as the developer explained:

You begin with loneliness as your antagonist, but as the colony grows, other challenges will arise. Help a poor alien who was conducting a biological survey, but is now marooned on a lifeless planet. Discover ancient, high tech ruins and unravel the secrets of the planet. Face idiot bureaucrats who want to micro-manage your colony and emerge victorious as a recognized independent planet-state in the Galactic Union of Planets!

The real question is: how will you do it? Will you go the natural way and keep everything "organic" or, since it's set in the far off future, will you go down the route of genetically modified super-plants? I'm all about the mad space farming science, bring it on. Just don't go expecting it any time soon, we're looking at 2022 for the release.

As it's now been funded, it's listed on our growing and dedicated Crowdfunding Page . Getting closer to tracking 400 projects.

Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing, a popular drone racer that's enjoyed by many users on Steam just recently had a massive free upgrade released.

It's been available in some form since 2015, with a full release in 2018 and still LuGus Studios continually develop it and add new features. This big 1.3 release is all about preparing it for the future with much of the underlying tech being overhauled and upgraded.

One of the reasons they did a big upgrade to the Unity game engine that powers it was a "hidden limit", which as they added new content and features over five years it ended up causes them some big problems. However, Unity in that time changed a lot and their game heavily relies on physics so it was a big overhaul job. Additionally, they optimised the game as a whole to now precisely control what it loads and when to lower the memory usage.

Some of the big highlights include:

• Engine update from version 5.6 to 2018.4.
• Major code reworks of some essential Liftoff systems to increase stability and optimize memory usage.
• Content management systems update: optimized loading and memory usage:
  - Tracks now only load those track items actually needed by the track, instead of all of them.
  - Drone setups now load faster and memory usage is optimized.
  - Race AI opponents are now generated locally instead of downloaded from the Liftoff Pro service.
• Updated physics to 4.0, as previously featured on the Experimental Branch.
  - Updated drag model to be more accurate based on the exact setup of the drone.
  - Some skins now have an impact on the drag behavior. This is visualized with an icon next to the skin in the Workbench.
  - More about what's included in Physics 4.0 and how it affects the flight behavior of your drone can be found here and here .
• Added Replay feature. Save your flights and watch them whenever you want:
  - In Free Flight and Infinite Race, after a drone reset, your flight recording can be saved in the Pause menu.
  - In Race and Freestyle, you can save your recording in the finish screen or afterwards in the Pause menu.
• Added Russian Woodpecker Night Fever environment variant (for owners of the Night Fever DLC pack).
• Updated the Minus Two environment to make it perform significantly better.
• Added third person spectator option to multiplayer.
• Added Vulkan rendering support on Linux.
• Updated the loading screen to show what's happening in the background and changed the loading background image depending on which level is being loaded.
• First/Third person camera mode is now saved and applied on every time a flight session is started.

That's just a small taste, see the full post here . What's clear here is their dedication. They have over 2.5 thousand user reviews on Steam and they clearly went to keep updating Liftoff for some time and bring in more players. Additionally, they've shown clear dedication to the Linux port too, responding in detail to any Linux issues and helping to get it sorted.

You can buy Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing on Steam .

Vecter from developer Taranasus is a free infinite racing game all about lasting as long as possible and destroying anything in your way. The idea in Vecter is that it constantly tries to destroy you while you race. There's obstacles, enemies, power-ups sometimes to help and more on the way as it's further developed.

After launching into Early Access in November 2019, it's now officially on Linux too. Curiously, the developer mentioned in their release announcement how they're actually using Linux themselves now as Manjaro is the main system on their laptop.

Watch video on YouTube.com

There is a small difference in the Linux build, which is how it won't play YouTube videos because for some reason Unity is really lagging behind on cross-platform codec support. Linux with Unity is still only able to use three video codecs. Hopefully one day the Unity team can sort that, as it keeps causing issues. Apart from that, it seems to work perfectly.

A fun little detail went into the leaderboard, as they added in platform icons. It's a small bit of fluff but I really love little things like this:

There's another fun feature included that allows you to change the colours of everything, for people who are colour blind that will probably be really nice.

While it's currently in Early Access they have said a full release is planned for October 15. You can play it right now officially on Linux direct from Steam .

Love a challenge? Enjoy some of the classic neon arcade shoot 'em up experiences? You should definitely take a look over at Space Cadet then.

It's a super-simple game mechanically and yet it's also seriously good too. Trapped inside some sort of arena, presumably done to keep the gameplay tight and focused, and abandoned by your crew during a mining operation - you're operating a space ship by switching between different systems with one button and activating them with another. Only having two buttons really makes it challenging and hilariously difficult too. Check out the latest update trailer:

Watch video on YouTube.com

You have to flick between everything . Having only one available at a time makes you need to think quickly and it really reminded me of going to a proper arcade many years ago. You get that same feeling of "if I don't get this right, I'm totally screwed" that sometimes only such classics can do. Space Cadet is a great game to quickly have a blast through.

Getting to grips with this two-button mechanic is…hard. Especially getting the steering right, since it switches between left and right each time you touch it and you need to keep an eye on that so you don't just turn right into an asteroid. However, managing to spin your ship into the exact position needed and then frantically mash the buttons to get over to the weapons module to fire and actually land a perfect hit feels glorious.

Feature Highlight:

• Master operating five separate stations in your ship: Helms, Weapons, Shields, Tractor Beam and Damage Control;
• Mine asteroids and avoid black holes;
• Fight against two enemy types in epic dogfights;
• Ever-increasing difficulty level.

The developer, Idan Rooze, has a lot of plans to expand it based on the level of support it gets. Some of those plans include a single-player campaign, multiplayer and more overall content.

You can pick it up free (PWYW) on itch.io and donate there too if you like it.