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Games: Crosswords 0.3.15 and Timberborn Review
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GNOME ☛ Jonathan Blandford: Crosswords 0.3.15: Planet Crosswords
It’s summer, which means its time for GSoC/Outreachy. This is the third year the Crosswords team is participating, and it has been fantastic. We had a noticeably large number of really strong candidates who showed up and wrote high-quality submissions — significantly more than previous years. There were a more candidates then we could handle, and it was a shame to have to turn some down.
In the end, Tanmay, Federico, and I got together and decided to stretch ourselves and accept three interns for the summer: Nancy, Toluwaleke, and Victor. They will be working on word lists, printing, and overlays respectively, and I’m so thrilled to have them helping out.
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Boiling Steam ☛ Timberborn Review
Timberborn is a “futuristic” beaver colony simulation game on a 3D map with fluid dynamics, making verticality an important aspect of the gameplay. Developed and published by Mechanistry, it runs well on GNU/Linux with Proton. Humanity is long gone, but it is not forgotten, as its ruins and waste still scar the land deeply. Now the beavers can claim the land, but only if they can survive the crazy weather and toxic contamination. Before we start with the gameplay, I have this quirk that if the game offers tools, I always check them first, and Timberborn comes with a map making tool. I had some fun playing with the tool and experimenting with the water physics to understand how it affects the rest of the world. In this voxel-based world, you can build terrain in variable heights, the smaller unit is a single block, but you can change the “brush” to easily make mountains or canyons. You can also add vegetation to the map that will appear dead at first. Enter the water source.