FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Linux Game Company Opens Doors

3 November 2007, New York - Sixth Floor Labs LLC, a Linux game development company, has launched their business today. Founded by Ethan Glasser-Camp and Carl Li, the company aims to improve Linux's desktop feasibility through the creation of high-quality games. Games are "sold" to the Internet community through the "ransom model" -- for one large payment, the product is released under the GPL and freed forever.

Sixth Floor Labs is offering up the next installment of their new game, Project: Alexandria. Project: Alexandria is a top-down shooter with an inertia-based physics model, like Asteroids. The first set of levels is already available on their website.

The next set of levels, called "the healbeam campaign", consists of 8 levels and supporting assets -- music, sound effects, dialog, and art -- that have been developed over 8 months. The one-time "ransom fee" is $40,000, collected through the microPledges website. The company estimates a month's work is all that is left to finish the campaign.

The Sixth Floor Labs is operating on the assumption that the open source/free software community has a difficult time producing high-quality games with the same facility that they have produced other software of all times. The ransom model allows the community to subsidize the production of games to offset the apparent difficulty that exists today.

The ransom model offered by Sixth Floor Labs follows in the footsteps of the Blender Foundation campaign, which raised 100,000 EUR in seven weeks, and the Free Ryzom campaign, which raised pledges for 170,000 EUR in twenty-five days.

The collection progress can be seen at http://micropledge.com/projects/project-alexandria-healbeam .

About Sixth Floor Labs LLC:

Sixth Floor Labs is a New York-based company which has been operating in "stealth startup mode" for a little over a year. It is the brainchild of a Linux zealot that wants to give a push to the "world domination" plot. You can visit their website at http://www.sixthfloorlabs.com/ .

Ethan Glasser-Camp

Executive Sous-Chef and Public Relations Officer

ethan at this site

In case you're looking for the first release, which is already GPLed and freely available, it can be found at Final release 1!.

Ethan

This is our official "first release" of Project Alexandria, also known as the "training" campaign. It represents the "launch" of our site and business. We'll still be getting pieces together for the rest of the night, but I'm very excited!

If you've played r1-rc3, the main changes are: a slightly improved AI on the enemies, some slightly better dialog, and some cleaned-up level structure (the test levels are now in a separate tests/ directory).

alexandria-r1.tar.gz -- source tarball (12.2 MB)

alexandria-r1-win32.zip -- py2exe'd Windows executable (15.8 MB)

Requirements are: python >= 2.4, pygame >= 1.7.1, ODE >= 0.7, pyode >= 1.2.0, Numeric. All of these are in Debian unstable. Also required: a pretty fast computer. An FPS counter appears in the lower-right of the screen if FPS drops below 27; ideally it should be hitting 30.

In case you're new here, the Sixth Floor Labs is a company whose business is the production of high-quality, GPLed Linux games. See about for more information.

Ethan

Ethan

Hey guys, we've put up a prerelease of the initial first campaign which we intend to release when we eventually launch one day (possibly as soon as next week? Yeah, right). If you want to see what we've been up to lately, please feel free to grab:

alexandria-r1-rc2.tar.gz -- source tarball

alexandria-r1-rc2-win32.zip -- py2exe'd Windows executable

Note that I've completely failed to test either of these, so they may be even worse than they usually are. Feel free to let me know about any problems!

Ethan

Ethan

You might not know this but I just switched the site over to use our new design (working title: "6fl-gray"). The header image is courtesy of Esther Cheung; its title is "An Empty 6th". I may slide it up/down based on feedback from a friend (does the thing on the right look like a skull to you?). Fortunately this is easy to do with some CSS magic.

I also added pages for some tags which previously didn't exist: music, sounds, etc. All in all, a good day to be a website.

I'm tagging this post "news" for the first time in some months. Maybe it really isn't all that newsworthy that we redid the site design, but I'm pretty psyched! Don't worry, we should have some more important news soon.

Ethan

Brown paper bag release of alexandria -- accidentally forgot to change something. 0.1 is maybe too easy.

alexandria-0.1.1.tar.gz -- src tarball

alexandria-0.1.1-win32.zip -- py2exe'd Windows executable

alexandria-0.1.1-src.zip -- src zipped (just for fun)

bouncy 0.1 is out, and it has a new name! It's now called "Project Alexandria". We're very happy with what we have, and there's a lot of neat eye candy and chrome improvements since the last version. That's right, we didn't stop after we got backgrounds for levels 4 and 5 -- we burned the midnight oil to make a 0.1 release that kicks ass. If you played 0.09, you might appreciate that we toned down the difficulty and frustratingness of a couple of the levels (level 1 and level5). Also, we added a bit of cinematic flair. We hope you like it!

alexandria-0.1.tar.gz -- src tarball

alexandria-0.1-win32.zip -- py2exe'd Windows executable

alexandria-0.1-src.zip -- src zipped (just for fun)

0.09 is the first "official" release. It's a very playable demo of the first five levels.

It would be 0.1 except that some art is missing -- level 4 and level 5 are missing backgrounds in some places.

Be aware that it's pretty hard to compile right now; it relies on ODE 0.7 and pyode from svn.

bouncy-0.09.tar.gz -- src tarball

bouncy-0.09-exe.zip -- py2exe'd Windows executable

Looks like I have what appears to be a website. It's not much right now, but I hope it gets the job done.