Nils Grotnes emailed me about 20 minutes ago with some pretty cool news.
Aquaria by Bit Blot ,Gish Published by Chronic Logic, Lugaru HD by Wolfire, and Penumbra Overture of course by Frictional Games have pledged to go open source.
Free as in speech open source...not necessarily free as in beer. Devs need to make a living to0.
Regardless, this opens the source up to the community. Problems like audio conflicts that have been "fixed" in these games can be seen, learned from and implemented.
If you seem to recognize these games, it's because we mentioned the Humble Indie Bundle when we talked with Dave Burke of Hemisphere games.
To quote the Humble Indie Bundle website:
'The Humble Indie Bundle experiment has been a massive success beyond our craziest expectations. So far, in just over 7 days, 114,049 generous contributors have put down an incredible $1,032,684. Of this, contributors chose to allocate 31.02% to charity: $320,343 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play Charity. I have made a page for the full breakdown including credit card fees in a JSON format here (json)."
I am just now starting to make contact with the Devs of these games to get their input, however the news should go forward. Regardless of motive, these games are now being open sourced to the betterment of an entire community. From what I have gathered so far, the folks from Wolfire came up with the idea to open source their Luguru code and approached the other companies and developers within the Humble Indie Bundle group. So far Wolfire's Lugaru and the three other Indie houses mentioned above have pledged to open their code or engines.
Frictional Game Penumbra should be of particular interest due to their surprisingly agile engine. The razor-edged engine for Penumbra was greeted with acclaim due to the new levels it allowed players to manipulate the game field. Frictional had this to say about open sourcing Penumbra.
We have been thinking for quite some time to release Penumbra as open source but never gotten to it. When we where approached by Wolfire regarding the Humble Indie Pack, there was some talk about releasing the games as open source too. This sounded very interesting to us and we felt that it was the right time for it as well. Even though the source contains a lot of useful base code (several years of work), the engine itself is not something that we used and where just rotting on our hard drives. Because of this we felt that it would be better to release it to the public and hopefully someone will have use of it. We are extremely interested in seeing what people can do with it and are hoping to see some cool stuff pop up in the future!
Stay tooned for further news
All-Righty Then
