Ancient Beast updated and the Deceiver

Ancient Beast 0.3 is here (blog post, forum announcement)! This gorgeously drawn game makes another step towards the vision of its developers.

Heya! It’s been too long since the last release, about 3 years; long time indeed.
We’ve finally repaired the prototype and added several new playable creatures, along with more features,
goodies and bug fixes, not to mention that all the old units have been pretty much revamped.
A ton of work, but it was totally worth it!

Ancient Beast is a player vs player turn based strategy game played online where you command all manner of creatures (3D printed! Beware the power of playing God!) in a battle for supremacy amongst the ruins of the apocolypse. Or something like that. Sounds fun. :)

Ancient Beast 0.3

Deceiver (formerly "The Yearning") has been rebranded in its latest update. GPL licensed code is available on github, and there's a steady history of updates going back 2 years, but the assets remain copyright of the developer.

So is it Free Software? Purists would justifiably say no. For example, no OS (Linux, BSD etc) distribution could include it without the developer's express consent. I can see the reasons for going down this path as the developer is now approaching publishers, and having anybody able to take his game and publish it externally would be an issue of contention. Which brings us back to an old topic of discussion - is it possible to monetize a Free Software game project without compromising on the licensing of any part of it?

Deceiver rain experiments

Some would say such a game shouldn't even appear on this blog, but given the relative inactivity of the blog you'll have to indulge me this once for discussion purposes if nothing else!