Ok, so, first of all, many thanks go to Zethfox and Mike, who have driven 95% of the improvements to Wagic since the last release. Many thanks also go to the other devs of the Wagic team who contributed to this release. As usual, we bring an insane amount of changes in this version, but let me introduce Wagic to those who don’t know about it yet:

What is Wagic?

Often compared to commercial games for its replay value and quality, Wagic is a heroic fantasy card game, in which you fight as a wizard against the computer. As you win battles, you unlock new game modes and earn credits that allow you to improve your army. Wagic is community driven and entirely customizable: you can create themes, mods, new rules, or even new games (check for example Knights VS Dagons on our forums, a game strongly inspired by strategy games such as warcraft). Wagic is available in several languages (English, French, German, spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian), and open source. It currently runs on the Sony PSP (as well as on the PS Vita if you have VHBL), Windows, Linux, maemo, meego, Android (phones and tablets), and iOS (iPhone, iPad).

Changelog

Almost 1000 new cards were added to this release thanks to the work of Zethfox and Dr Solomat. This means we now have more than 9400 unique cards in the game. Among these cards are the long awaited Planeswalkers, as well as a few new sets. We also dramatically improved the Android and iOS ports, especially the deck editor. Check the changelog below for more details

• Close to 1000 new cards, Wagic now supports more than 9400 unique cards, including (finally!) Planeswalkers support, and Dark Ascension
• (iOS/Android) replaced some psp specific shortcuts with buttons for the touch screen. This makes the deck editor, in particular, much more usable
• (iOS/Android) more intuitive way to scroll cards left and right in the deck editor, which should make it easier to build a deck
• On Android, it is now possible to choose if you will download the game files on the internal memory or your SD card (experimental)
• Many bug fixes, and minor gameplay improvements on all platforms (too many to describe them all)

More Info

Remember that in addition to the news in this blog, you can find more Wagic news on twitter and facebook thanks to Leungclj

Download

If you enjoy Wagic, please consider a donation. Thanks in advance!

Alternatively, if you like Wagic, please spread the word! An article in your blog, a post about this release in your favorite gaming forum, a video on youtube… everything helps!

download here

The link above takes you to the download page where you can choose the correct archive depending on your platform
As usual, enjoy this new release of Wagic!

Wagic is an Heroic Fantasy card game with a mix of luck and strategy. You can find details here.

If you don’t want to help finding the bugs and/or prefer to wait, the public release should happen soon enough.

Without going too much into details (which I will do for the official release), this version finally adds official support for Planeswalkers, and many improvements in the interface for touch devices (Android/iOS)

I’ll also do proper thanks for the official release, but want to already thank Mike for organizing the beta, and Zethfox who did a huge part of the changes in this new version of Wagic.

Check it out here

Everything, from the card images to the rules, is open source, and welcoming users contributions. One of my hopes for Wagic is to make our engine flexible enough that we will support WTactics one day.

One of the major difficulties in creating a collectible card game is art. Each card needs to have its own art, and players are quite demanding in this kind of hobby. Recently, WTactics started a donations drive, with a quite interesting concept: For a fixed price donation, they will turn you into a character on one of the cards in the game.

The base donation for this is 75$, but you get a 10$ discount if you don’t ask for a Human or elvish character (they probably have enough of these already). For a full blown portrait, this is a very reasonable price. The resulting image is published under the GPL license on opengameart.org (awesome site!), and every game developer can use it however they want.

If your boyfriend/girlfriend is into Heroic Fantasy, this can be a great present (trust me, you wont find such good art for such a low price anywhere else!), and it contributes to open source art, which is fundamentally a very good thing

More details on the WTactics site here: http://wtactics.org/portrait/. This is a promotion limited to the first 20 requests, so hurry up

I don’t speak Chinese though, below is the rare card I got in that booster, anybody know what it is, or what it does?

MTG’s Dark Ascension will be part of Wagic’s next release, thanks to the work of the Wagic team. In case you didn’t know yet, you can download Wagic for Android, iOS, the Sony PSP, Windows, Linux, Meego, and Maemo on the download page here.

Thanks to the work of Xaw Otihs, this new version of Wagic is now also available for the Nokia Platforms Maemo and Meego (respectively, the N900 and the N9/N950). That release of course gets all the bug fixes and improvements that we described in the 0.17.1 release.

Download

You can download Wagic 0.17 for all supported platforms on the download page here

Often compared to commercial games for its replay value and quality, Wagic is a heroic fantasy card game, in which you fight as a wizard against the computer. As you win battles, you unlock new game modes and earn credits that allow you to improve your army. Wagic is community driven and entirely customizable: you can create themes, mods, new rules, or even new games (check for example Knights VS Dagons on our forums, a game strongly inspired by strategy games such as warcraft). Wagic is available in several languages (English, French, German, spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian), and open source. It currently runs on the Sony PSP, Windows, Linux, maemo, meego, Android, and iOS (iPhone, iPad).

Note: The Linux binary on our download page is still 0.16.0 and we are doing our best to provide a binary asap, but in the meantime you can always compile a binary directly from the sources if you can’t wait (sorry).

What is Wagic?

Often compared to commercial games for its replay value and quality, Wagic is a heroic fantasy card game, in which you fight as a wizard against the computer. As you win battles, you unlock new game modes and earn credits that allow you to improve your army. Wagic is community driven and entirely customizable: you can create themes, mods, new rules, or even new games (check for example Knights VS Dagons on our forums, a game strongly inspired by strategy games such as warcraft). Wagic is available in several languages (English, French, German, spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Serbian), and open source. It currently runs on the Sony PSP, Windows, Linux, maemo, meego, Android, and iOS (iPhone, iPad).

Changelog

This version of Wagic comes with more than 500 new unique cards, including some from the long awaited set Innistrad, but the main reason this release took time is that we today bring a version of Wagic available for iPhone, iPad, Android and Meego (Nokia N9) on top of the already supported platforms (Windows, Linux, Maemo, and the PSP). This required major improvements to our game, and this is the main reason this release took so long. Other platforms are however getting there share of bug fixes and improvements, see details below.

Detailed changelog:

• iOS (iPhone/iPad) version now available! (see details below)
• Android version now available! (see details below)
• Meego (Nokia N9) version now available!
• More than 500 new unique cards. Wagic now supports 15400 cards (8700 unique), including cards from Innistrad.
• New abilities for card coders. We will update the card Wiki asap with details
• A new progress bar in the main menu shows you how far you are from completing the game (unlocking all sets, mods, opponents, etc…)
• You can now easily create unlockable mods. If you’re interested, check the rules folder, in particular the file awards.dat
• A new file system supporting zip files. For users, this change will mostly be transparent, but it should make installing the game easier, as well as installing/uninstalling mods. This should also make it easier for most people to install images. See this thread in the forum for details, especially if you want to create campaigns or mods for the game.
• Many bug fixes

Special notes about the iOS and Android versions

Wagic has been around on the PSP for years. It gave us lots of time to improve it. Hopefully, these 4 years of development will be visible when you try Wagic on your touch device. Nevertheless, this is a whole new interface to handle for us, and we know it is far from perfect. But we are doing this release because many people have been waiting for it. Wagic on iOS or Android is not perfect, but we hope you’ll enjoy it anyway. We hope that this release will motivate some additional devs to come and join the fun of working on this project. We are a bunch of hobbyists creating Wagic on our free time, come and join us! The source can be downloaded here. If you have the skills to compile the game and fix a bug or improve something, send me a patch and we’ll give you write access to the SVN!

The iOS version requires a jailbroken device. The android version requires you to install the apk by yourself, using for example Astro. We are aware that solutions such as cydia or the android market exist, but we are waiting for an improved version of Wagic before we go mainstream.

More Info

Remember that in addition to the news in this blog, you can find more Wagic news on twitter and facebook thanks to Leungclj

Download

If you enjoy Wagic, please consider a donation. Thanks in advance!

download here

The link above takes you to the download page where you can choose the correct archive depending on your platform
As usual, enjoy this new release of Wagic!

Wagic’s support for touch screens is still experimental, and the UI is not perfect yet, but hey, once again, let me use the opportunity that we would love to get more devs, so if you’re interested, please join the fun

Own an iPad or an iPhone? You can download Wagic 0.17 beta here. Also, since I don’t own any iOS device myself, I would love to see videos of the game in action on youtube, so please post videos .

Oh, almost forgot to mention, this (of course) requires a jailbroken device.

Wagic is an heroic-fantasy card game, supporting more than 15’000 cards (more than 8’600 unique cards). The beta is currently available for the PSP, Windows, and Android. Yup, Android joins the Wagic fun. If you were one of the early testers of the Android version, you’ll probably enjoy some of the improvements of this version, although I’d like to mention that the android version is still work in progress, and not yet at the level of quality one could expect (in particular, we haven’t worked a lot on the shop and the deck editor yet).

Besides the Android compatibility (which is a major achievement!), this version brings tons of new cards (including the long awaited Innistrad), a new support for zip files (something that, as a user, you might not see, but will make updates, mods, and a pile of stuff much easier to handle), an experimental “undo” feature (ok, please don’t hurt me too much, but I think that feature doesn’t work on the PSP yet…feel free to report it as a bug), and a new “progress bar” on the main screen that will show you how much you still have to play in order to beat the game (as in “unlocking everything”).

I expect the beta to last no more than a week before a full release, unless major issues are found.

Want to test this beta? Go to the announcement thread here

Wagic running on a Motorola Xoom

For those of you who still don’t know, Wagic is an heroic-fantasy strategy game, initially inspired by Magic the Gathering, which with time has evolved into a flexible system allowing players to create their own cards, campaigns, rules and mods. For Wagic 0.17, we’ve been mostly focusing on Android. This doesn’t mean that other platforms are not getting any update, but this basically explains why we haven’t done a release in a while. My goal for the Android version of Wagic was to come up with an entirely new game (by “new game”, I mean a mod that wouldn’t be MTG). We’re getting there, but it’s taking more time than I initially expected. In parallel, we also need to fix lots of UI issues on touch screens… As a result, Wagic for Android had been in a public “test release” for a few months now, and, since that release we’ve done lots of progress, but there’s still lots of work to do. Nevertheless, Android will also get a 0.17 release, just so that people can see the progress we’ve made in 3 months. It won’t be perfect, but I know you’ll forgive us

One of the cool avatars made by Ilya B. for Wagic

In parallel we are also making progress on the iOS port, but again we would love to get more iOS devs to help us. The iPhone/iPad port might not see the day of light until we get a few dedicated devs to help. As a reminder, Wagic on the iPhone/iPod/iPad is already fully functional, it’s just a matter of finding the right people to maintain it and fix the bugs. If you think you can help, grab the source, and send me an email

About the game itself, all platforms including our beloved PSP will get a bunch of new features and new cards. Wagic 0.17 will have about 400 600 new cards, including cards from the Innistrad set, and with it some new mechanics. The current Alpha I’m looking at already has more than 8500 cards 8700 cards, and hopefully we might add a few ones here and there. We’re also planning to (finally) add an undo feature to the game, although it’s not yet sure if it will make it to Wagic 0.17, since it’s quite experimental for now. One of the major changes for this version will not be visible to players, as we reworked the resource files in a system that will allow you, among other things, to have all your images in one single file instead of one file per set. This system should simplify the work for people who want to install new stuff in Wagic (cards, themes, campaigns, images, etc…). If I have enough time, this system will also allow me to distribute some additional themes, campaigns…directly from the download page.

Please be a bit more patient, we’re doing our best so that Wagic 0.17 reaches your PSP/Android/PC/… as soon as possible

In the meantime, you can still download Wagic 0.16 on the download page, and if you want to test it on Android, follow the instructions in this thread

One of the many great open assets that can be found on opengameart. This image is taken from the card game WTactics

Note: A list of sites where you can download free art that you can legally use in your video games (including for commercial usage) can be found at the bottom of the article, read along.

Working on Wagic has introduced me to the painful reality: I suck at graphics. Initial graphics in Wagic were mostly made of copyrighted content, and this eventually led me to trouble. Our game has since then been blessed with the help of several talented designers (including Julio, Jeck, Ilya B., Kaioshin…), and, let’s be honest, art is basically the only thing players have to make their first impression on a game, so I’m really really thankful for these people’s help.

If you’re a game developer and suck at drawing like me, there are a few options for your game, and you’ve probably thought about some of them already.

The easy solution, the one most people unfortunately choose, is to take your graphics from somewhere else, without looking at copyright information, or knowingly stealing graphics from games/movies/anime… You won’t see any harm in that initially, but if your game ever becomes successful (and don’t we all want that to happen?), this will bite you. For the youngest among my readers, taking a character from an anime and removing the background does not make the art “yours”, and redistributing it is copyright infringement in most countries.

Another option, which many of us choose, is to use “easy to make” art, that even you can create. Your main character becomes a blue cube, and its enemies are red circles… Obviously there’s so far you can go with such a solution, once all possible clones of tetris and pong have been made on all platforms.

The luckiest among us have a friend who happens to be a designer, motivated by their project, and who will help as a full part of the team. But if you’re in this situation, you’re most likely not reading this article. I’ve seen on many homebrew forums people offering their services as a designer for free. I’ve grown extremely suspicious of those. Many people who have  claimed to be “designers” to me on those forums were kids with close to no drawing skills, who had been running a pirated version of Photoshop for 15 days, recompositing stolen art and claiming it to be theirs. My advice would be: avoid like the plague such “artists”, not only will they bring you legal trouble, their creations are often not great, and they have no experience in teamwork. Depending on the size of your project, trust is extremely important between the devs and the designers. A good designer will not join your project if you haven’t proven that your game is seriously going to happen. The same way, as a good project “leader”, you shouldn’t accept a “designer” who cannot prove they are good. In my case, with Wagic, the game came first, and then designers came, and provided graphics. They didn’t “offer” their help, no, they came to us with art, telling us “hey, I made that for your game and thought it would be interesting for you”. We provided a working game, they provided “working” graphics, no false promise of “help for the future” here, or rather, the promise was in the achievement. Both the dev and the artist were able to tell each other “I can work for a good amount of time on this project, and provide a result” before even actually talking for the first time. forums discussions starting like “I’ll code a game” and “yeah, and I’ll do your graphics” rarely lead anywhere.

Another option if you have a bit of money is to look into royalty free stock photo websites, such as dreamstime.com (this is a random example, I am not affiliated with them, and have not tested their services). These sites can sell you pictures for as low as 1$ per picture, and allow you in most cases to use those in video games, even commercial projects. However I’ve dug recently into many of those sites, and let’s be honest, it is very unlikely that you will find lots of useful content for video games… no textures, no 3D model, close to no drawings (mostly photos…)… but it can help for a loading screen here and there.

For the rich among us, art commissioning is also a possibility. I don’t have details or good resources on the subject, but the basic idea is that you pay an artist to do the work for you. I’ve seen prices for such commissions go as low as 5$ per request on ebay, but never checked if this gave you the right for commercial use, or even redistribution. I guess it’s up to each creator and how you can convince them. I’ve also seen prices go up to 1000$ per image for a complex request, and commercial use.

The best solution I found recently is to focus on Creative Commons, Public domain, or GPL art (GPL art is kind of an heresy, really, but it exists nevertheless). A few sites are designed to gather that kind of art. I’ve unfortunately ran into many sites claiming they have “Public Domain” art, when a quick google search showed that this was pure b***s***, so going only to trusted sites is an important thing here.

The best site on the subject I could find is opengameart.org. They have thousands of sprites, 3D models, 2D graphics, sounds, all available with very precise license explanations, and most of them being available even for commercial projects (as long as you are ready to make derivative art available with the same license, which is not too much to ask, I think). The major point of that site is the centralized access to open resources you would have to hunt on the Internet otherwise. Free Art Search and FreeGameArt are similar sites, but not as well organized as OpenGameArt IMO.  Burningwell.org is a site with Public Domain images. These images are free for any use, including commercial works. Again, we run into the problem that images on burningwell are “only” photos, and will need some tweaking on your end to be usable in your game.

Those are the easy ones. If you’re ready to dig more, google books has options to look for books published before 1910. Those that contain images will be in the public domain, so things like that can be investigated as well.

finally, this page has a series of links to free game art that you might want to check.

opengameart.org is to me the most interesting of these websites, with its community-oriented system, and the fact that I have been successfully using some of their resources recently for one of my side projects. I wish I could contribute directly to that site, but I’m not an artist so for now I’ll just say that my way of contributing is that Wagic is open source (and has been so since the beginning). If you happen to be a talented artist and want to help the indie gaming community, opengameart.org could be the best place for you