Yo Frankie! An open source platformer created using Blender.
I recently gave a presentation on the landscape of open source software in computer games at the Univ. Rey Juan Carlos, where I am currently visiting the Libresoft research group. My slides are available here.
While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender.
A disappointment was the state of open content sharing. While some sites, like OpenGameArt and New Grounds provide tagging with a Creative Commons license, far more common are sites like Google’s 3D Warehouse that have site-specific terms of use, and provide no ability for artists to indicate they are willing to share their work via Creative Commons or an open source license.
About the author: Jim is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz. He has research interests in procedural level generation for computer games, as well as automatic bug prediction. His favorite games are Radiant Silvergun and Civilization IV. Read more from this author
6 Comments
Where do you include game modifications or total conversions here? Games like Counter-Strike and such that grew from a mod community are also open-source, but I have a feeling that they don’t work like open-source teams that build other types of software.
However, I have nothing to back up this gut feeling
I’ve been dinking around with Flixel (a AS3 tile based game engine) in the past week or so and it is a pretty great. I’ve messed with a lot of game engines/building tools, and this is one of the only ones that actually worka the way you think it ought to.
Thanks for the feedback! One of the challenges in putting together this talk was avoiding the desire to just catalog everything. Wikipedia has a number of pages that provide catalogs of open source game technology, and so I didn’t want to duplicate that. In the end, I aimed for coverage of major technologies and games all in one place, in hopes that this would at least provide a roadmap into the huge range of open source game technologies available.
I’ve been following independent gaming for a while, primarily through TIGSource. There’s an interesting interaction between open-source projects and indie development – namely, that better open-source code acts to enable increasingly sophisticated indie projects.
The typical transaction is that indie projects ship a game on top of open-source code without contributing back, because indies are acting primarily from self-interest, and the things they could contribute back are almost entirely specific to their project(game assets). For example, many indie projects are using Construct or Flixel now over Game Maker or MMF2 out of a preference for the open source codebase.
But as Jim points out, the content-creation side of things is still lacking.
The data pipeline I’m using for my own project has been brought to some kind of working state over a torturous six-month period. All open-source tools: Blender, Wings3D, Inkscape, Gimp, and various audio apps. The problem wasn’t with those tools, but with integrating everything in a way that would make it easy to iterate over assets and then adding the game-specific tools on top. A lot of indie projects use tile maps and pixel art because the tooling and skill requirements are low. Going to a more sophisticated paradigm means more complexity in all areas of the tech. The only way to resolve this, really, seems to be for someone to make the upfront effort and then release the code. (I’m going to do that.)
Panda3D(http://www.panda3d.org/) made in Disney and maintained by CMU.
Goodle Summer of Code (http://code.google.com/soc/) has supported some FLOSS game tools/engines communities that has active members who can mentor student developers.
For example, game engines including Crystal Space, ScummVM, WorldForge.
Tools like GIMP, Audacity(sound editor).
Applications like Micropolis(SimCity for OLPC), Battle for Wesnoth, BZFlag, and tiny games embedded in desktop environments.
@James:
Love that you’re working on an open-source pipeline! I wish I had the same get-up-and-go as you
I was particularly interested in this: “For example, many indie projects are using Construct or Flixel now over Game Maker or MMF2 out of a preference for the open source codebase.”
We teach at UCSC with Game Maker right now, and I’d enjoy hearing your experiences with Construct. Flixel is sadly out, as the course is a general education course, intended for all students, Computer Science major or not. Construct looks like it has parallels with GameMaker, so I’d like to know how you find it!
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[...] series of open source computer game authoring tools are described in this faculty member’s blog post. Jim Whitehead (UC Santa Cruz) notes some recently-developed programs like Game Editor, Novashell, [...]