If you're interested in getting a bunch of games each month, the Humble Monthly has at times been quite generous with the selection. Things are about to change, with it being renamed to Humble Choice with new options.

Currently, you pay a set fee of $12 a month (or less for more months) and get at least one game to play early. Then at the end of each month, they give you a bunch more games ranging between 7-11. That's changing sometime later this year with Humble Choice. As the name suggests, it does seem to actually give you a little more control. Games are revealed upfront instead of being a mystery and you pick the ones you want from a larger list.

One piece of PDXCON news missed from yesterday: Imperator: Rome is getting a free Punic Wars Content Pack along with the upcoming Livy Update.

Paradox Development Studio sure are busy. Not only are they working on multiple Stellaris expansions, Crusader Kings III and Hearts of Iron IV: La Résistance they're also trying to turn around the rough launch of Imperator: Rome. Another big free patch is coming out named Livy which will include: a new character experience system, a rework of the family system, a procedurally generated mission system, a map with greater details including showing war on the map with burning cities and more not yet announced. It's going to be big!

As probably most of you already know, or recently found out, at the beginning of this week the GSoC coding period officially ended, and it is time for us, GSoC students, to submit our final evaluations and the results we achieved thus far. This blog post, as you can probably tell from the title, will be a summary of all of the work I put into modernising Five or More throughout the summer months.

My main task was rewriting Five or More in Vala since this simple and fun game did not find its way to the list of those included in the Games Modernisation Initiative. This fun, strategy game consists of aligning, as often as possible, five or more objects of the same shape and color, to make them disappear and score points.

Besides the Vala rewrite, there were also some other tasks included, such as migrating to Meson and dropping autotools, as well as keeping the view and logic separated and updating the UI to make this game more relatable for the public and more fresh-looking. However, after thoroughly discussing the details with my mentor, Robert Roth (IRC: evfool), more emphasis was placed upon rewriting the code to Vala, since the GSoC program is specifically designed for software development. However, slight UI modifications were integrated as to match the visual layout guidelines.

As Google Summer of Code is officially drawing to an end, all of my attention was focused towards making the Five or More Vala version feature-complete. As you probably already know from my previous blog post, the game was somehow playable at that time, but it was missing some of the key features included in the old version.

So what’s new this time? First and foremost, you can surely notice the game board now sports a grid, which wasn’t there until now. On the same note, there are also animations used for clicking a piece on the board, for an improved gaming experience. For further accessibility, some header bar hints are available at different stages in the game: at the start of any new game, at the end of each game, as well as whenever there is no clear path between the initial position and the cell indicated by the user for the current move.

It's Friday morning, I've got my coffee ready so let's go over what's going on what Paradox Interactive. They've got a lot going on right now!

Firstly, it seems Crusader Kings II has gone fully free to play. This doesn't appear to be time limited either, the Steam store page properly states it's "Free To Play" and on Twitter, the Crusader Kings official account said "This is not a joke - Crusader Kings 2 is free to play!".

Considering it has a rather large amount of DLC, it's seven years old and it's been given out temporarily free for keeps before, it seems like a good idea to set the base game free for everyone now. Looks like all the DLC is also 50% off.

Alterego Games and StickyLock Studios have announced that their adventure game Woven is releasing on November 15. Woven certainly looks pleasant, with a world that looks like someone stitched it together and your character is a stuffed animal.

Woven is a laid-back adventure and exploration game, where you roam a world made of fabric. They said all the stuffed animals once lived in peace and all appears well at first glance, but not everything is as it seems. As you progress through Woven as the clumsy character Stuffy you customize them with different animal shapes to gain new abilities, solve puzzles and attempt to find out why the world is being invaded by metal machines.

While perhaps not as big as previous events, it's still a good time to boot up Team Fortress 2 again and have a blast. Dust off your crazy mask, pick a silly weapon skin and dive in.

A couple of bits of news from Egosoft to share for their massive space sci-fi sandbox X4: Foundations.

With character art during the turn-based battles that look like paper cutouts in a 3D environment, Wildermyth certainly has a strange and lovely charm to it.

Currently available on itch.io were users have been testing it for some time, Worldwalker Games have now announced that their character-driven tactical RPG will enter Early Access on Steam on November 13. In Wildermyth, your party will be tasked with defending the lands from various threads, switching between the turn-based combat and making decisions on the over-world map. It has choice-based comic-styled events, which can end up changing your heroes appearance, personalities, relationships, and abilities.

Sometimes you just want to be an evil wizard, build a dungeon and look after some imps. KeeperRL lets you do just that and it just had a big new update with much better modding support.

With the introduction of Steam Workshop support, mods and retired dungeons can now be shared to it to allow others to easily download and try them out. As for the rest of the modding support lots more can now be tweaked. Items, building info, Z-level width, creature names and so on can be changed with mods now and creatures can also drop custom items.

Scarecrow Studio are now crowdfunding to finish up their very colourful comedy adventure game 3 Minutes to Midnight.

The Kickstarter campaign is now live, with a funding goal of €50,000 they need to reach by November 8. They've already amassed support with over €38,000 so it's likely it will be fully funded.

Taking inspiration from the classics like The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Sam & Max Hit the Road (where have I heard this before?), Scarecrow Studio said 3 Minutes to Midnight will take the point and click gameplay, blend in some humour and high-definition art with an intuitive interface and a "compelling mystery" to solve. They also say it has the "largest script in point-and-click history" and "over 1000 interactable objects" so they're setting the bar for themselves pretty damn high.

This is quite a surprise! Early yesterday we were notified that Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, which Feral Interactive ported to Linux in 2015 has gained a Vulkan Beta.

Since companies rarely make much money from older ports like this, it's quite fantastic to see it being given some love. Especially like this, giving it a big boost with a much newer graphics API. This is not long after Feral Interactive confirmed the Linux release date for Shadow of the Tomb Raider Definitive Edition and also announced Total War Saga: TROY for Linux too.

Arcen Games have now fully confirmed that October 22 is the final launch date for AI War 2 to leave Early Access.

This is the sequel to the critically acclaimed AI War: Fleet Command released back in 2009, which eventually came to Linux too later in 2014. The release of AI War 2 is going to mark 10 years since the original! Funded on Kickstarter back in 2016 with the help of around 2,545 backers.

AI War 2 is a grand strategy RTS hybrid against an overwhelming, inhuman enemy who has conquered the galaxy. The enemy has made only a single error: underestimating you. You must steal as much technology as you can, take enough territory to fortify your bases and launch your last stand.

Their aim with Dominus Galaxia is to be an upgraded spiritual successor to the original Master of Orion, they said to think of it like if Master of Orion 2 was a proper sequel and not a "a radical re-imagining".

It's currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter which has 10 days to go with nearly 50% of the funding needed, with a bit of a stretch it may be able to make it. Just recently, they put up a full demo of the game with Linux support on itch.io.

Swim, kill, adapt and hopefully survive. That's the aim of the game in Sipho and the recent update adds in some new pieces for you to unlock to build your horrific sea creature with.

It's such a strange game, blending together furious action with a creature builder where you unlock different parts and species. Based on real science, inspired by the Siphonophorae with your creature being built with zooids, an animal that forms part of a colony that all move together.

Megagon Industries have now confirmed the status of Lonely Mountains: Downhill for Linux and currently it's not good news.

This is a game that was funded on Kickstarter, that had Linux as a platform for release. If this sounds familiar, it's because we wrote about this game recently where the developer seemed a bit confused on the Linux version and they weren't clear on what they were doing.

Fight off waves of demons in Project RIP from developer Storming Tech, a new Unreal Engine first-person shooter that has Linux support. This is the same developer who also made Escape Legacy: Ancient Scrolls, an escape room puzzle game which also seemed quite good.

The huge free Conquest expansion for the strategy game Northgard is now confirmed to be releasing on October 22.

As announced before this free update is going to include a new standalone game mode, which can be played solo or in co-op. Offering up a series of missions, offering a what they claim is "100+" hours of extra possible play time. The missions don't seem to be linked, offering up something new each time with specific victory conditions and rule sets.

ChaosForge continue advancing their turn-based shooter roguelike shooter Jupiter Hell, with another big update now available.

A big focus has been on the AI to actually make it a bit smarter. Humanoid enemies will now attempt to take cover and not always run in a straight line at you, which can make it a little more difficult for sure. Most enemies will also react to noise you and other NPCs make. The demon-like enemies will now track you by smell, so you can't hide from them. You might find the need to retreat more often, to find a better position.