Glow – The Freeware Action Game

»Glow« is a 2D action plat­former by »Black Chronos«, a small game developer studio found and lead by Sven Gramatke in 2006, that ceased to exist in 2014. The game was mostly programmed by Holger Meisel, and the 3D graphics mostly done by Sven Gramatke. I started contributing to the game as a 2D artist and beta tester. In 2008 we decided to release the game as freeware. I'm working on an all-new version 1.666 since then.

In 2016 I decided to re-release most of the games art assets and tools under CC-BY-SA. The author you should credit is the game developer studio »Black Chronos«, which mainly includes the founder, producer, writer, and 3D artist Sven Gramatke, as well as me, Thiemo Kreuz, in my role as a programmer and 2D artist.

Art assets

• In-game music (2007–2010)
• 40 atmospheric background sounds (2007–2009)
• Wallpaper images (2007)
• Media archive from the original Glow 1.666 developers weblog (2008–2011)
• Shatterboxx Extended TrueType font (2011, description)

Tools

• Black Chronos File Extract unpacks data files from the Black Chronos games Glow and Sorades
• Glow Bullet Maker generates lightning ball animations
• Glow Cleanup Tool removes unused assets from the game's data folder
• Glow Flag Maker generates waving banner animations
• Glow Map Resizer Tool shrinks or adds paddings to existing levels
• Glow Map Tool generates random levels and renders overview maps
• Glow Object Editor allows to fine-tune the bounding boxes of the game's entities
• Glow Rain Maker generates rain, cascade and lava animations
• Glow Set Language is a tiny INI patcher written in Delphi 9
• Glow Statistics Tool makes sure the game's levels are consistent
• Glow Swarm Maker animation generator (2010, description)
• Glow Tile Maker texture generator (2009, description)
• Glow Tileset Tool brings the game's tile sets in an order convenient for the editor
• XML Cruncher transforms XML files based on XPath rules

Downloads

• Glow 1.666 four levels preview version (2011-10-09). I recommend to run it under Linux with Wine.

Information

• What’s Glow? (2011)
• Was ist Glow? (Deutsch, 2008)
• Projektvorstellung bei Developia (Deutsch, 2008)
• Projektvorstellung im ZFX + Developia-Forum (Deutsch, 2008)
• The original Glow 1.666 developers weblog (2008–2015)
• Changelogs from the weblog (2009–2011)
• English User’s Manual (2007)
• Deutschsprachiges Handbuch (2007)
• Game controls (2007)
• Full credits (2007)

Videos

• Short screencast from the December 2010 preview (2010)
• Original promotional clip (2007)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.