July is when the summer doldrums start to threaten. If you feel your hammock calling, resist the temptation, and turn instead to Chromium B.S.U., an adrenaline-pumping 2-D vertical shooter.
The game has been around for about 10 years. Creator Mark B. Allan came up with it after trying out a Linux port of a DOS shooter called Raptor. “I began to wonder how hard it would be to write a similar type of game using OpenGL. I had been wanting to experiment with SDL and OpenAL for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity.”
However, Allan soon abandoned the effort at a time when the game had non-free fonts and audio in it. In 2008 Australian developer Paul Wise began working with Allan and others to remove the non-free stuff and replace it with free alternatives, and fixing bugs. Today the game runs well. Wise says future plans include porting it to OpenGL ES so it can be run on smartphones, adding new audio, new levels and weapons types, “and anything else that doesn’t detract from Mark’s original artistic vision.” However Wise has limited time to work on Chromium B.S.U. himself these days, so he welcomes help “mainly with the bugs posted on the tracker – I use that as a to-do list – and translations.” To get involved send e-mail to the chromium-bsu-devel mailing list or find Wise on IRC, in #freedesktop-games on Freenode or #debian-games on OFTC.
Since Google debuted its planned operating system and called it Chromium, Chromium B.S.U. has suffered an identity crisis, forcing Wise to do a little shuffling. “In Debian I renamed the package from chromium to chromium-bsu. Due to Ubuntu’s fast-paced release cycle and the introduction of chromium-browser, the chromium transitional package is an annoyance for Ubuntu, but they don’t seem to have the developers to do a simple thing like dropping a transitional package. The chromium package in Ubuntu sometimes receives bug reports that I see and reassign to chromium-browser.”