@games I am a game developer working on game called Mushy Score. I decided that my niche would be to create open source games. I think these could be helpful for developers or teachers to teach about games and how they are made. Most open source games are small game jam games, but there are few “real games” that are open source like 0 A.D. and Doom. As a non-developer do you think open source games could be good thing?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] daniyeg@lemmy.ml 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

although I've searched for specifically FOSS games in the past it's not really a niche, i would still pick out games in genres i liked.

still as you have said there's a real lack of "good" FOSS games, because most people make games with engines that do not facilitate open sourcing your game, artists unfortunately think copyright is good and you can't open source your game without also giving away your art or making your game free, or the most common case is that devs don't know/care about FOSS.

i think FOSS games are good however i also think games need to be very opinionated pieces of software, so do not delegate your design to other or "also open sourcing your design". the dev should ultimately be in control.

one thing I've seen even non FOSS games do is to use their repo as a public bug tracker, so in addition to that accepting contributions for bugfixes could also work. although i think it goes against the spirit of FOSS software you could also separate your artwork from your source code.

[–] wawe@mastodon.gamedev.place 1 points 8 months ago

Yeah, that is my current approach, the code is open source, but assets needs to be bought (that's how for example Doom is "opensource"). There are many ways to do open source and I guess I need to find out what is best way for me.

Examples of different types of open source games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_games