I shouldn't have been too surprised to see that ~half the games are more "mods" of existing games. I know calling a reverse engineered remake of Twilight Princess a "mod" is the understatement of the century, and I don't mean to denounce that work (easily harder than making a proper game), but I guess I was seeking games that had the developer's full blessings to view code of.
I think Overgrowth's approach to the gaming open source dilemma seems to make the most sense from a financial POV, and was one I was considering. You want to share your code, but not necessarily your assets, the arguable real value of your game. So provide the code but require a purchase to integrate the commercial assets into the codebase. My idea of it would probably include a few base assets in the codebase (it'd be possible to play a "Sample project" skeleton of the game from beginning to end), but most of the polish would still require a purchase.
I also pondered if you could take this further and offer a cheaper "Assetbundle package" for techincal folk who are fine building the game by themselves. Maybe even give it away in a non-commercial license. Just some way to try and encourage technical curiosity and foster some future modders/developers.
Pretty incomplete. This seems to be missing a lot of my favourites, including Open Hexagon, Minetest, TheXTech, SuperTuxKart, StepMania and osu!. Libregamewiki has a more comprehensive list:
Bitburner is a good open-source programming game. Most of the puzzles are NP-hard, so you have to use a mix of good heuristics and practical system optimization to get the best performance.
Personally, my favorite is OpenTTD and Mindustry. I also really love OpenMW (open source client for Morrowind), though this one needs the game for Morrowind itself. I was mindblown when someone ported OpenMW to the Android and played it on my phone the first time!
For OpenTTD, you folks should check out YT channel Spiffing Brit.
This is great! I would love to find some open source games that I could really get into. There's not many things more satisfying and rewarding than playing a great game and then being able to hack on it.
Anyone else out there like me that can give some recommendations of games they've gotten into? Minetest came super close and totally would be that for me if I was more into the Minecraft style of game.
I would also love to see some lists by:
1. Popularity
2. Rating
3. Tech stack (such as by language like C++, enginer like Godot or Unreal, etc). There's some info on wikipedia[1] but it's mostly not filled out. Guess it's largely a data entry job though.
I mean no disrespect to anyone who maintains a game on this list.
But I find this list incredibly sad.
A list containing mostly clones of other (old) games, or previously closed source games that have since had their source released. ( And few outside of iD software titles at that ).
It's difficult to get excited about a game when the promise is, "Play this game that was fun 20 years ago".
For all the creativity that ought to be present in the open-source "community", how come there's never really been a true open source gaming hit?
How is that the open source community can appear to organise to deliver millions of unpaid hours of cutting edge work when it comes to operating systems and it's applications, but falls so flat when it comes to the creative side, especially gaming?
I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy things like openTTD, it's fine to enjoy that if you do, but it's just difficult to get too excited about a game if the goal is simply to recreate an experience that was available 20+ years ago, and when the screenshots page unironically links 600x400 images.
If that's the best example of open source gaming, then there's no hope.
Perhaps I'm being unfair, certainly Mindustry looks like it actually fits the trifecta of being:
* Original
* Credible
* Modern
I can't see anything else on that list that fits that description though.
Lists like this do a dis-service to gaming, if someone was getting into PC gaming was presented this list, they'd be more put off than encouraged when many of the games appear to have fewer pixels than their mobile, and are loving re-creations of old games, many of which you probably wouldn't enjoy if you hadn't played the original.
If this list were simply a short list of the 2 or 3 games which do appear to be more modern and original, it would be a better list.
fwiw, Overgrowth is probably another exception to your grivances. But it's also only semi-open source; the assets still require a purchase, but it's neat that it's an option at all for a modern, "AA" scoped game without being a gray area reverse engineering project.
>If that's the best example of open source gaming, then there's no hope.
It's a difficult conundrum. Very few programmers can create a "modern" game from scratch by themselves. So you contract artists or buy asset packs. The former means you either eat a huge cost or try to sell the game to make it back, and the latter 99% of the time means you cannot make the game truly open source (unless you do an in-between like Overgrowth).
Those that can do that probably may only be able to scope to make games like Open Golf[1]. As a programmer I can respect the tech here. game made without an engine in plain C, which has lighting, physics, an in-game editor, and a full game loop. While being cross platform for web, mobile, and PC. We both know this isn't a trivial matter, but without those fancy shaders, global illumination, and maybe some VFX no one would see it as "modern". Without higher fidelity models and textures you get the feel of an N64 game from first blush, despite seeing effects and techniques no Gen 5 game could accomplish.
I agree with you internally, I do want to see some more ambtious open projects that can help teach the next generation what goes into a modern, shippable game. But looking (and partially being) in the weeds makes me understand why very few sizeable business can do what you request. Especially businesses targeting console, a whole other can of worms. I want to try and also prove the exception, but I'd also probably take the Overgrowth route so I can get some money on the side.
It definitely is, tankfully.
That list however is quite incomplete; I've found this one by following the links at the end of the page which contains a lot more FOSS games and development tools.
I think Overgrowth's approach to the gaming open source dilemma seems to make the most sense from a financial POV, and was one I was considering. You want to share your code, but not necessarily your assets, the arguable real value of your game. So provide the code but require a purchase to integrate the commercial assets into the codebase. My idea of it would probably include a few base assets in the codebase (it'd be possible to play a "Sample project" skeleton of the game from beginning to end), but most of the polish would still require a purchase.
I also pondered if you could take this further and offer a cheaper "Assetbundle package" for techincal folk who are fine building the game by themselves. Maybe even give it away in a non-commercial license. Just some way to try and encourage technical curiosity and foster some future modders/developers.