X4: Foundations is set to get much bigger with the upcoming 4.0 free upgrade and the massive sounding X4: Cradle of Humanity expansion due late this year.

This new expansion takes the X series back to Earth, which will significantly increase the size of the in-game universe with new sectors and it will bring in two Terran factions along with their economy, ships, weapons, stations and so on. Things are about to get political too, as they will come with their own issues and alternate perspective on the story so far.

Expansion features:

• Big expansion of the X4: Foundations universe with new sectors
• Return of Terran factions with economy, ships, weapons and stations
• Thrilling new story missions and adventures to experience
• New game-starts that allow new perspectives on the X4: Foundations story
• Introducing a new terraforming gameplay feature, evolving the endgame
• Visual improvements such as volumetric fog, making the X universe look better than ever

With the X4: Cradle of Humanity expansion, Egosoft also announce the "biggest free update to X4: Foundations yet" with the 4.0 update. It will bring in "major new gameplay features (e.g. a new terraforming feature) and wide-ranging visual improvements (e.g. volumetric fog)" with more info to come at a later date.

There's no trailer for it yet but a teaser will be shown today during Gamescom. If you want to watch it will premier around 23:45 CEST / 10:45pm BST / 5:45pm EDT / 2:45pm PDT on the IGN YouTube . We will update the article once it's available.

Pick up a copy of X4: Foundations and find your space legs from Humble Store , GOG or Steam .

Nimbatus is a game where you can let creativity flow and design some really wild and explosive stuff, now even more so with a major update out.

Not played it or seen it? You get to go through a random campaign, hopping from one planet to the next as you build up a powerful drone block by block. This can be entirely manual to get into the action, or you can attach various simple logic blocks and sit back to watch the fireworks. There's also various PvP modes too.

It released in full back in May , with the first major update out now. This free upgrade includes the ability to multi-select drone parts when editing, store drone parts as templates to re-use, new tutorials, a free camera option for the Programmer captain and various bug fixes. There's also some new building parts you can use including wheels, a grappling hook and a ballast tank. Certainly will be amusing to see what drones people come up with to use them. Springs also gained a linear option, which they say allows for better suspension on wheels.

Watch video on YouTube.com

The team also teased that a new Kickstarter will be coming "in about 2 months" for their next game, a city-builder where you're building on the back of a giant creature. Sounds interesting! Will keep an eye out for it.

You can buy Nimbatus from Humble Store and Steam . There's also a demo with the Drone Creator on Steam too.

GB Studio is a free and open source retro adventure game creator that allows you to visually make games that can work cross-platform on Linux, macOS, Windows…and the Game Boy.

Yep, the classic hand-held from Nintendo still has a huge homebrew community and with tools like GB Studio many more people can make games for it. GB Studio just recently had a massive 2.0 Beta release, which pulls in major new features for the project. The way it's going, it might end up as the ultimate retro game creation tool. Check out their trailer for the 2.0 release below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

We talked a little about in a previous article , as the idea is brilliant. Being open source under the MIT license is a wonderful touch too so anyone can learn from it. Not only that, it's just a sweet tool to use to make cool retro games that can run across PC systems and on a classic Game Boy too. Since it's a visual builder, no years of programming are required as you get to drag/drop and tick boxes to do stuff making it highly accessible. As of GB Studio 2, it also adds support for the upcoming Analogue Pocket device too (which looks awesome).

Just some highlights of what's new in the 2.0 Beta includes:

• Add full color support, each scene can contain up to six 4-color palette (24 colors per scene) and seven different sprite palettes.
• Add additional genres to Scene Type dropdown, "Platformer", "Shoot Em' Up", "Point and Click" and "Adventure", each one affects player handling in that scene. A single project can use any/all genres as required
• Add "On Update" script to actors which calls on each frame allowing movement to be controlled manually.
• Add event to dynamically switch color palettes used in a scene
• Add palettes section for editing and creating color palettes
• Add support for larger background images, up to 2040px in either dimension, maximum width * height of image must be under 1,048,320
• Increase number of allowed actors and triggers per scene to 30. Up to 10 actors will be visible on screen at the same time.
• Add ability to pin actors to screen to use as simple HUD elements
• Game engine completely rewritten to make less top down rpg genre specific
• Cache compiled files as much as possible to reduce time required for repeated builds
• The ability to eject the full source code of the game

You can find it on itch.io , their website and GitHub .

Have a Steering Wheel that you need to tweak on Linux for your favourite racing games? Oversteer can help with that a lot and a new release is up.

What can Oversteer do? Depending on what's supported by each device it can help you to change the emulation mode, change the wheel rotation range, combine accelerator/brakes pedals for games that use just one axis, force feedback gain, profiles for different games you can setup and more. It's almost essential if you like a good UI to work with your hardware on Linux.

Release 0.5.0 went out August 25, here's what's new:

• Fixed swapped pedal axes in the Logitech G920 wheel.
• Removed fake dead zones in the display of the steering wheel and pedals due to errors in some GTK themes.
• Fixed hot-plugging of devices with proper detection of disconnections and connections.
• Fixed warnings in the build/install process by upgrading requirements to Meson 0.50.
• Fixed enabling the screen ffbmeter when loading a profile.
• Added proper desktop environment identification of the app.
• New style for the overlay window with transparency and a title bar to ease relocation.
• The overlay window position will keep its position when in automatic display mode.
• The overlay window position is now saved in profiles.
• Experimental support for the Thrustmaster T300RS wheel.
• And other smaller fixes.

You can check it out on GitHub .

GemRB, a fine example of an open source game engine reimplementation for the Infinity Engine that powered the classic RPGs including Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment games celebrates two big things.

The first, is that they have put up a new official release with GemRB 0.8.7 which is technically minor but still brings in some fun sounding goodies including:

• New features:
  • new smarter pathfinder with bumping support
  • animal taming, iwd2 hardcoded saving throw bonuses
  • vcpkg and out-of-the box msvc support
  • non-ascii data filename support
• Improved features:
• disk reading speedups, ease of setup
• iwd chargen, pst spell timing, hardcoded overlays, iwd2 casting ai
• better actor speeds & walk sounds
• audio, pst ini handling, savegame compatibility, morale handling
• effects, projectiles, actions, range calculations
• bugfixes

Additionally, they mentioned work is ongoing on their rewrite of  "drawing and GUI handling" which is currently their main priority.

The second major thing is that they're celebrating a huge milestone. As a free and open source project, it's now been going for 20 years which is pretty incredible.

Work on GemRB was originally started on August 21st, 20 years ago, as project creator Daniele Colantoni went to SourceForge to try and gather a team to work on it, "I missed playing D&D with my friends so much /…/ I wanted to create my game to play via internet. So I started my personal reverse engineering process on the base files from Baldur’s Gate.". Many years later, it's now capable of playing through the full Baldur’s Gate saga, the first Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment (still needs polishing) and with Icewind Dale 2 having the first two chapters playable. Note: GemRB appears to not support the Enhanced Editions of the classics.

As GemRB marks its 20th anniversary, Jaka Kranjc, the current maintainer, is optimistic about the project’s future. "Our work is not finished, but this sort of thing is like an ultramarathon — for most of the run the goal is not within reach. Companies come and go, but FLOSS persists!"

You can grab GemRB from the official site .

One man band David Stark has managed to hit quite a milestone, with their game Airships: Conquer the Skies hitting over 100K sales.

It’s taken quite a while to get there though, with it arriving on Steam in Early Access back in 2015 and going onto a full release in 2018. Still, for a sole developer of a pixel art game about constructing steampunk styled airships it’s certainly impressive. Just recently, Stark put out an update that added in some fun new toys including guided missiles, kinetic bombs and more modules to attach to your creations. It really does look slick too, check this out:

To go with such an occasion, it felt like a good time to ask a few questions. Mr Stark was open to have a chat, so here's the result:

GOL: Can you please introduce yourself and your game?

DS: "I'm David Stark, the developer of Airships: Conquer the Skies. I'm a one-man game studio in Zurich, Switzerland, where I live with my partners and various animals. I'm also involved in the Swiss game development community, running regular meetups, GGJ Zurich, and serving as the president of Swiss Game Hub, a non-profit shared office/coworking space/incubator.

Airships: Conquer the Skies is a game about building steampunk vehicles from modules and using them to fight against each other, giant sky squid, weird robots, and more. It's inspired by Cortex Command, Master of Orion, Dwarf Fortress, and the webcomic Girl Genius."

GOL: You started Airships: Conquer the Skies seven years ago, what’s it like to work on a major project like this for so long?

DS: "It's strange to think that this has been such a large part of my life. I originally intended for it to be a fairly modest side project, but reactions were very encouraging, and so it kept growing.

Originally, I supported myself doing freelance software development, but as the game became more successful, I was able to afford taking fewer and fewer freelance contracts. Nowadays I can support myself from selling the game.

I'm fairly proud that after seven years of work the game's code still functions, and I still enjoy working on it, even if some of the technologies it's built on are definitely showing their age.

I hope to stay in game development for a long time. Eventually people will start calling Airships a retro game, if they don't already."

Watch video on YouTube.com

GOL: What are you most proud of when it comes to Airships: Conquer the Skies?

DS: "That I created something that so many people really enjoy. As a game developer, you're liable to these crises where you feel awful that you're not out there saving the world. But I'm honestly not cut out for being out there saving the world, and giving people joy is a pretty good thing too."

GOL: As I understand, you develop mostly on Linux, could you tell us a little about your tools and workflow?

DS: "The game is written in Java using lwjgl2 and Slick2D. Note that these libraries are now outdated and you should definitely use lwjgl3 when developing games for Java. Given Oracle's ongoing neglect of the language, especially on the desktop, it's probably a bad idea to start a new game in Java now. For consistency and convenience, I bundle a JVM with the game.

I use NetBeans as an IDE and have an intentionally very vanilla build setup that lets me get from nothing to being able to compile and run the game on a new computer in about five minutes, depending on how long it takes to download stuff.

For graphics work, I use GIMP, and for audio Audacity. I try to avoid video editing but when I have to I unearth or borrow a Macbook and use iMovie.

The game's data files are all JSON, which I edit with whatever built-in text editor is to hand, or Notepad++ on Windows.

Version control is handled through git, with no LFS or other clever stuff. One of the advantages of using text files and pixel art is that file sizes are modest.

I used to just use text files for something like project management, but I'm trying to use Jira to manage to-dos and sprints now, with some success.

Operating system: Linux Mint, having switched from Ubuntu a few years back when they started doing weird things to their user interface.

I've used Mac, Linux, and Windows for development, and what most attracts me to Linux is the excellent package management. I can install and uninstall libraries and software at will, and I'd much rather use an open source project from the package manager than an app store or some dubious thing I downloaded from somewhere. I'm also comfortable using a command line and prefer having clear control over what I'm telling the computer to do.

Hardware-wise, the majority of the development happened on a HP ProBook 450 G5, which managed to combine good performance with a very reasonable price, solid Linux support, and most importantly - a trackpad with actual physical buttons. I prefer working with a laptop on my lap rather than at a desk, and doing pixel art with a tap-to-click trackpad is basically impossible.

After a few months trying to use Windows on an unmentionable machine, I'm now about to switch to a HP Zbook 15 G6, which I hope will serve me well."

GOL: Hitting 100K is such a huge milestone for an indie developer, especially when you’re mostly alone on Airships too! What would you say helped towards your success?

DS: "I chose to start selling the game very very early in its development, after about six months of part-time work. This meant that I could get feedback from players very early on, and also build up interest bit by bit. So by the time the game got onto Steam, there was already some interest.

A big break was when YouTuber Stuff+ started making videos about the game, which rapidly expanded the game's audience. He was followed by a number of other creators to whom I am very thankful for seeing the game's fun and potential."

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

DS: "As a notionally successful developer, I feel very conflicted about this. I very much enjoy making games, and it's currently working out for me. But the reality is that most indie games don't get anywhere near breaking even. And Airships is one game, one data point. Some luck was definitely involved in its success. My next project might fail. So I'm not a good reference point.

The big question you should ask yourself is: What do you want? (Accidental B5 reference, oops.)

If you want to make games for the joy of making games, consider doing it as a hobby rather than as a job. Making things you enjoy into your job can destroy your enjoyment. Creating hobby games gives you maximum creative freedom.

If you want to be part of the game industry but don't mind about creative control so much, working in a game studio gives you a chance at a regular paycheck - though beware of predatory third-rate game schools and studios squeezing you dry with overwork for little pay.

Finally, if you want to create your own games *and* make money doing it, you have to think about what you can make that people want. That doesn't mean forcing yourself to create some over-commercialised thing with in-app purchases, but it does mean that you have to verify as quickly and effectively as possible whether your game project has any traction. Rebecca Cordingley's article about "Marketing-first Game Development" is a good starting point."

GOL: What’s next for Mr Stark? Will you be continuing to expand Airships or moving onto something new?

DS: "I have too many ideas and too little time. Next up is a major update for Airships adding diplomacy, co-op fights, and more features for strategic conquest mode.

After that, there are two expansion packs for the game I'm considering. One would add naval combat, water, and sea monsters. The other one would add heroes, mascots, and story events.

And then I have a whole other prototype for a game waiting in the wings. Nothing to do with airships, but featuring more small simulated people having horrible things happening to them..."

A big thank you to David Stark for taking some time to answer my questions! You can see our other interviews with developers using this dedicated link . As for the sales split across platforms on Steam, Stark shared this:

• 1% - Linux
• 5% - macOS
• 94% - Windows

You can buy it from Humble Store , GOG , itch.io and Steam .

Hinterland Studio have given an update on the progress of the next episode of the single-player story for the survival game The Long Dark.

Like with a lot of studios, COVID19 has caused all sorts of issues. Hinterland's studio lead, Raphael van Lierop, said in an announcement they're all doing well but they did shut down their physical studio back in March, so they've been in lockdown since then. Working from home (as I would know), increases your distractions many times and when you need to work as a studio, it can end up consuming even more time to communicate on simple things.

On the subject of Episode 4, they said they don't feel good about releasing it this year. Originally, they wanted it ready for December but work has been slower. However, they are making progress on it but the main point Lierop mentioned is that they don't want to "crunch" and end up compromising on quality or scope. No one wants that of course. They also mentioned a "more uplifting update" will come within the next few months with more info on other bits they have planned.

Sad news then if you're waiting on more story content but the good news is that The Long Dark has an impressive survival sandbox mode, which had a big update earlier this year .

You can buy it now from Humble Store and Steam .

After buying the rights to the combat flight sim Heliborne from JetCatGames, the team at Klabater have updated Heliborne into an Enhanced Edition that's out now.

This new upgrade is free to existing owners and bundles all the DLC together into the game, along with a bump to the price of the game which now has no DLC as it's just one single edition and purchase. You can see the release trailer below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Doesn't look much Enhanced, even their own trailer shows clear stuttering.…

What's included:

• New Prototype Machines
• Fully Upgraded Game Engine
• New Day & Night Maps
• Updated in-game Physics
• Empowered Multiplayer Experience
• Refreshed User Interface

On the surface, it sounds like a good upgrade. Sadly though, it seems they've not taken it in a direction that players are happy with. Since the Enhanced Edition release, it's moved into a Mostly Negative user review score on Steam. It's been so poorly received that they've put the previous version up as an opt-in Beta on Steam under the "heliborne_original" tag which also contains all the DLC. You know you messed up when the community largely wants to play the original, doesn't seem very Enhanced does it? Klabater have a lot of work ahead if they wish to turn this around.

You can buy Heliborne on Humble Store and Steam .

Developer Matthew Brown has crafted a set of brilliant puzzle games with the Hexcells series and it seems they're not entirely finished with them years after release.

The series has gone onto receive wide acclaim from other critics and users on Steam, with each game in the series having thousands of user reviews and a positive rating. So clearly Brown has done well here. If you've not played them: they're a series of ambient and relaxed logic puzzles. You could say it's a puzzle game in its purest form, with no bells and whistles and that's part of why it's so good.

Watch video on YouTube.com

One thing has bugged me though, which is how god damn bright it is. Thankfully, not so much an issue now. Each in the series got a nice 2.0 version bump adding in new options like—a dark mode! Hooray! Now you can relax, solve some puzzles and not get eye-strain. The first two games also gained mid-level save states and cloud saves, with the third entry Infinite getting a hard mode for the level generator and level listings for custom puzzles.

Pictured: dark mode.

To top it off, all of Brown's puzzle games on Steam are on a massive sale at 70% off:

• Hexcells
• Hexcells Plus
• Hexcells Infinite
• Complete Pack

The Hexcells complete pack is also up on Humble Store with DRM-free copies but no sale there. I've yet to try Brown's other games but they're also on sale, see the dedicated Steam page here .

I have to admit, I had never played any of them until this week and I have now joined the ranks of the many who will happily sing its praises. Brown did a wonderful job crafting a set of great puzzle games here, that takes clear inspiration from some classics including Minesweeper while having their own unique brain-twisting added to the mix. Do take a look.