Turtle Arena 0.7 is now available for download after 5.5 years of development. 2009 days since Turtle Arena 0.6 in memory of the year TMNT 2003 TV Series ended and TMNT Arena was first released (okay, that’s just a coincidence). Most of the development was on Spearmint and it’s Quake 3 game logic mint-arena. See https://clover.moe/turtlearena for downloads.

I use to refer to this release as Turtle Arena Classic. It’s mainly a refined version of Turtle Arena 0.6 that changes some content back to 0.4 and 0.2.

The Ninja Turtles no longer have tails. The non-commercial music by Neil Crowe is back. The Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory weather effects are back (GPLv3 with additional terms). The main game icon (which was intended for the original characters project, EBX) was changed back to Turtle Arena. The team icons are now Sais, Katanas, and Shuriken again. The EBX team icons featured in 0.6 (Clover, Shell, and Plus) are still available if you set g_redteam, g_blueteam, and g_neutralteam console variables.

There are some level improvements. Mainly the shrub model lighting and some content added to the upper area in Leaks (dm1). The levels are unintentionally brighter due to fixing external lightmaps not having overbright applied. Though, somewhere in-between might be nice.

The game now features multiple initial startup loading screen images. Unfortunately this is the only thing inspired by Project DIVA that has make it into the game.

But most importantly the text quality has been greatly improved.

The incomplete Main Game (co-op platform mode) has been removed from the main menu. Set ui_maingame cvar to 1 to re-enable it. Co-op is still available in the start server menu though.

The combat system is exactly the same same as Turtle Arena 0.6; with the exception of reducing the unbearable attack delay of the hammer and axe. So if you found Turtle Arena 0.6 to be a terrible game, it still is.

Turtle Arena 0.7 consist of  platform-independent Quake Virtual Machine game logic and unmodified Spearmint 0.5 client/server executables for Windows, GNU/Linux, and macOS. This is the first Turtle Arena release available for macOS.

Turtle Arena running on unmodified Spearmint is also a decent technical achievement as Turtle Arena is the one of the few standalone ioquake3 games started after the quake3 engine source code was released. This resulted in Turtle Arena touching a lot of things in the engine that Quake 3 mod gone standalone game do not. Though it’s underwhelming since it’s my game and my engine.

This release establishes how to make new Turtle Arena releases so it’s more likely to be updated now. That said, I have no plan to begin serious work on it again.

My personal interest at this point is to reduce melee attacking in Player vs Player game modes to a side arm your never need to use like Quake 3’s Gauntlet with the main focus being a first-person shooter. I don’t anticipate changing Turtle Arena into a first-person shooter without replacing the characters and changing the game title though.