FreeGameDev

Hello,

I've been recently trying to contribute to LibreGameWiki and along the way found a number of new games -- that at least I have not been aware of. I am not sure if they were just overlooked or I've been ignorant, or if there is a catch to their freeness. Can we take a look at them here?

A major source for me was GitLab. Everyone seems to be using GH, but if you dive deep into GL (admittedly not so easy to do: projects -> explore -> most stars -> filter by "game"), you can find nice stuff. E.g. this list of free games.

Games I've found so far:

• Thrive
• Veloren
• Evolution RTS
• Vegan on a Desert Island
• Argentum Age
• OPMon
• OpenLieroX

I've tried OpMon. It's doesn't look like it's very complete yet. There is an NPC called Beta that allows you to do a battle. I don't know if you can find random battles.

Edit: Veloren is promising but still very early in development. It complains cursor grabbing isn't available under wayland and exits.

I tried Argentum Age some time back, and it's quite a nice one. I should try it again and see if there was a particular reason I didn't add it to my list or if I just forgot to.

I've been just trying to run some of these, and indeed most are in a very WIP state, but that's still mostly the default state of any libre game. It's a shame these games are so well hidden even from the sights of us who actively seek free games.

OPMon - Sadly I wasn't able to run the binaries, nor compile it. I've been also checking out Tuxemon, but found some unclear licenses, plus one non-libre font license.

Veloren - Able to compile and run, but there is yet no gameplay to talk about.

Evolution RTS - Able to run the binaries. However it seems to require connecting to a server to play, and I don't know if the server is free software. Will have to check.

VOADI - Able to run an older revision (before the update to the newest Solarus, which my distro can't run). Looks like a very cool game. I don't want it spoiled before the release though, so I'm stopping there. Putting on my watchlist.

Thrive - Not been successful to run. Shame because it looks very nice.

Just found another potentially nice game: Cave Story NX. Let me check it out. I'm a bit confused by the explanation of the data licenses.

EDIT:

Also check out this cute tower defense: https://gitlab.com/free-electrons-labs/dka-game.

Does anyone know Abuse?

It's a 1996 platformer game - it reminds me of onpon4's Hexoshi - that was made mostly public domain. It's super awesome, with amazing graphics, has been ported to SDL. However, here is the catch:

1. The music and sound is non-free. This is kinda okay because the game runs without it, you can play some music in the background, or someone can drop in a free replacement.
2. The commercial levels (above 4) are non-free as well, according to this.

However, the GH repos say that the levels are free, mentioning only the music being copyrighted. The archived release notes are old and mentioned that the motivation for not releasing the levels was the fact that they were still being sold, which I doubt is the case anymore, so I wonder if maybe they were later released as well? Because that would be pretty awesome.

Anyone has any insight?



EDIT:

Looks like this project tried to address this?

From the changelog it really seems they replaced these. The GH repos also look like they use these new levels. Gotta confirm this though.

Okay, so supposing the FrAbS archive is completely free, as it claims to be ("As far as I know, there is no material in this archive that is not public domain. I sure hope that the acronym is justified.", the log etc.), I believe this game is free if you use their levels. They are already in the GH repositories, but they're not used by default. You have to delete the original proprietary levels from data/levels and replace them with the FrAbS ones. I tested it and it works. Think I'll put this on LGW now.

Another quality game: Nikki and the Robots

for me games that need steam or itch to be downloaded dont classify as libre.
itch requires google recaptcha to be filled during log in (of course im not doing this)
steam is proprietary 3rd party platform. Evolution RTS is on steam..

I wish devs who make games didnt bother with putting them on stuff such as steam... :S

No game here requires Steam. I hate Steam. I build most of these games from source.

oh nice

well as much as i am against spreading hate i think that is nice that some people are out there who think similar to me.
but i go on evolution rts and the only way it's either itch or steam??
https://www.evolutionrts.info/download-evolution-rts/

i downloaded itch from arch AUR and you see i logged in and i see fill google recaptcha to continue and i dont wanna fill it so i deleted it and dont know if i can get this game from anywhere else?? how did you buidl this game from source??
sorry im new to linux and free games too, so i'm sorry.

You could try building it from source https://github.com/EvolutionRTS/Evolution-RTS

yeah but is game that you need to download your source code from a website that belongs to m$ a truly libre game??

cynicfm {l Wrote}:yeah but is game that you need to download your source code from a website that belongs to m$ a truly libre game??

As of now yes, stop spreading FUD

Old Veloren is now deprecated and there is a new Veloren project. It didn't compile for me. I really dislike the dependency features of "modern" languages. Compiling Veloren grabbed four versions of rand, two versions of image, three versions of parking_lot, three versions of crossbeam-deque, etc. That just strikes me as insane.

Deleted.

Lyberta {l Wrote}:At least it is much better that installing them by hand, usually even via root. Or building yourself. This is insane and I welcome proper package managers.

Package managers aren't going to fix this. The packager would have to fork all of the projects to get a consistent version for the "libraries" used. No one is going to do that. It is convenient but it's not really safer than building yourself. Unless you use a separate account, the build/install could still delete or copy all of your files. If tell someone they lost all their files but the system files are safe, they aren't going to consider that much of a win.

Cave Story NX seems to say to the data files are CC0. I tried out the game and don't really understand what is going on.

Deleted.

cynicfm {l Wrote}:yeah but is game that you need to download your source code from a website that belongs to m$ a truly libre game??

It is because it is freely accessible and it comes with the rights to redistribute, so if hosting by m$ is a problem (which to me of course is), anyone can rehost or mirror it elsewhere as well.

---

Building from source is definitely not very convenient, just from the fact that it can take half an hour to finish -- I sometimes prefer it for reasons (e.g. check if an old game can still be rebuilt under a modern system, check if it doesn't require any "pseudo-open-source" packages to build etc.). But I think it's important for up-to-date binaries and/or packages to be available for "normal" people -- games with source that's not trivial to compile simply can't get very popular if it's the only way to play it.

Lyberta {l Wrote}:Docker instance for every application I build.

What is it with these containers and why is everyone so excited about them? It seems to me like another M$/Google Steam-like bloat (Wikipedia says they're also among main contributors). Can't a game be just a normal program running under an operating system? Do we have to build another environment on top of an operating system? Sorry, maybe I'm just misinformed, I've just never seen a reason for using these.

drummyfish {l Wrote}:

Lyberta {l Wrote}:Docker instance for every application I build.

What is it with these containers and why is everyone so excited about them? It seems to me like another M$/Google Steam-like bloat (Wikipedia says they're also among main contributors). Can't a game be just a normal program running under an operating system? Do we have to build another environment on top of an operating system? Sorry, maybe I'm just misinformed, I've just never seen a reason for using these.

Quite OT, but Docker is extremely useful for running networked services and orchestrating multiple web-servers.

For games and such, I think the main perceived benefit is that commercial app-stores have a somewhat lower liability for allowing malicious software to be distributed through their platforms as often the case in the Android Playstore for example. A properly curated open-source repository doesn't need it and attempts to introduce such (snaps / flatpacks) are lazy time optimizing developers and commercial interests that would like to establish an app-store like system.

Deleted.

Alright, thanks for the explanations. Back on topic:

Here is a game from a Godot engine showcase I've just seen (https://hooktube.com/watch?v=NlKEO1N8wMM):

https://github.com/Bauxitedev/meteorite



gameplay:

https://hooktube.com/watch?v=wwO46Xt0Sf0

It looks pretty amazing, with a Portal-like mood and a retro pixelated graphics, BUT, guess what... though being otherwise free, it uses an unfree font. It's a tiny pixel font that could easily be replaced, and there was already an issue created about this, but the author closed it. I asked for it to be reopened and suggested some replacement fonts, but am not sure if it's going to work. Maybe if someone is bored out there, forking this and replacing the font could be a nice thing to do Might as well kill two birds and rehost it somewhere else than GH.

drummyfish {l Wrote}:It looks pretty amazing, with a Portal-like mood and a retro pixelated graphics, BUT, guess what... though being otherwise free, it uses an unfree font. It's a tiny pixel font that could easily be replaced, and there was already an issue created about this, but the author closed it. I asked for it to be reopened and suggested some replacement fonts, but am not sure if it's going to work. Maybe if someone is bored out there, forking this and replacing the font could be a nice thing to do Might as well kill two birds and rehost it somewhere else than GH.

Welcome to the Godot community. They don't know or care about the Four Freedoms or any of our other LARPings. I was going to jab them a lot more but I woke up with a headache and I'm feeling lazy.

Speaking of non-GitHub Godot projects, I made Sky Hammer in Godot 2.1. Completely public domain (Unlicense) but the game sucks. As for the repo host, RocketGit is incommunicado about cleaning all the spam off of their site, but it is open source, though I don't know how libre AGPL is.

https://9nations.de/

Art assets are mostly unfree, but well documented: https://bitbucket.org/trutzimt/9nations ... ew-default


Oh and the Veloren link you shared is outdated. Better are these:
https://veloren.net/
https://gitlab.com/veloren/veloren
(actually some really nice progress on this game lately)

Another find: Eye of Doom.

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/level ... ds/eodmega

This is a WAD (custom campaign) for Doom 2, licensed CC-BY. It contains no extra art, just levels. Now we have Freedoom, a free resource replacement for Doom, which aims for compatibility with mods, so all in all, these combined together should be all free. I wonder if there are more WADs like this one -- Doom was such a legend that there is about a bazillion of custom fan-made campaigns like this, as levels are much less difficult to make than a whole game. --- Now if only a fraction was licensed as free we could have some more or less original shooters based on the Doom engine. If any Doom veteran here knows where I should be looking for such WADs, let me know.