FreeGameDev

My oldest friend and I dreamed of a free/libre mobile platform game, where you have a real freedom of movement. So finally, we made it—almost…

Update: the game was published!

The story: Edgar (you) is an old mustached activist at Greenalien. His task is to explore and escape from an underground laboratory. He fights against experimentation on alien beings.

We wanted to use GPL, but only LGPL or more permissive is allowed on the App Store, so the code is LGPL 2.1 and the assets CC-BY: https://github.com/PolipGames/Edgar


youtu.be/lmzz6sqzB70
(updated video—this was the older version)


You can download it on the App Store or build it for free on an iPhone or iPod using XCode (Apple’s developer IDE). It takes about 20 minutes to complete the 6 levels.

Chronology
August 2014 ⇢ we start the project (the first sketches)
September 2014 ⇢ “Proof of concept” of the game using Objective-C and the SpriteKit library. Very low FPS and counter-intuitive controls
January 2015 ⇢ First map and first textures for a playable level
August 2015 ⇢ We choose to use “Tiled”, a great libre tilemap editor which outputs XML files
September 2015 Intensive cleaning of the whole source code
November 2015 Thanks to our first players’ good advices, we change the controls and work on a better difficulty slope
January 2016 ⇢ New user interface (resume game, new game, save score), ability to restart from the last played level after you shut down and restart your phone
February 2016 ⇢ New cleaning of the whole project, first commit on GitHub
February-March ⇢ Testing
April 2016 ⇢ First submission to Apple to deploy on TestFlight: rejected because of Guideline 2.10 (any iPhone app must also work on iPad at iPhone resolution, see here).
April-May 2016 ⇢ iPad compatibility, many fixes, small improvements
June-July 2016 ⇢ Lots of work on code readability, UI and bug fixes
August 2016 ⇢ Available on the App Store. The review only took a day and a few hours.

We talk about this process (in french, with screenshots) on a Facebook page.

Contribution
- if you create a level with the GPL editor Tiled, we’ll add it to the main story or maybe create a “Contrib levels” menu like in SuperTux. There is a a level template and more explanations here
- there is only music at this time. Libre licensed sound FX are really hard to find, I don't count the hours I spent on sites like freesound.org. If you have some hints, they're welcome!
- long term: we’d be happy if a contributor joins us. If we move everything to the Godot engine (MIT licensed), it could mean work on this project together.

Also, feel free to use our project as a starting point to quickly try something else on iOS, for example a “light” clone of the great GPL shooter XEvil (iOS development supports c++)!

The game engine is Apple’s SpriteKit library. The project would be more libre with Cocos2d or lua, but these libraries have much less specific and up-to-date documentation for iOS. As a beginner in game programming, I think I couldn’t have made it.

We didn’t founds many FOSS games for iOS… There is 2048 (MIT license) and I read “Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection” is libre, but I didn’t saw the right sources when I cloned the git. If you know LGPL iOS games, we’re eager to discover them.

Besides, we'd like to use the libre engine Godot for the next releases, but it's a huge work. The scripting language, GDScript, is very nice (similar to Python).

Why iOS: The idea was to make a first release on one platform, then see if we succeed in doing something nice and "playable" and maybe port it to other platforms. As we only have iPhones 4 and 5, it seemed the easiest to do in the first time (and I love Objective-C).

Edit (August 20, 2016): added release, updated chronology, made the text more concise

First of all, congrats for developing this game! I sadly can't test it as I have no Apple device, but the video looks pretty interesting

If you're interested in porting it over to Godot to reach as many platforms as possible, I can only encourage you in this direction (being myself a Godot contributor and game developer). The kind of mechanics that are shown in the video are quite easy to implement in Godot, even the lighting mechanism for example (it actually looks just like the 2D lighting demo in Godot). And if your focus is free/libre games, you'll find that the community is very supportive of such efforts. With some buddies we even have a small team that specializes only in libre games, most of them GPLv3 and a couple MIT (https://github.com/KOBUGE-Games), and we'd likely be glad to help you port your game over to Godot if you want to go this way.

Now, I don't want to hijack your thread too much with self-promotion, so back on the topic

Simon Tatham's puzzles are indeed libre under the MIT license. I'm not sure if they have been ported to iOS though.
I've met a couple iOS-only libre games every now and then but never really had a close look at them as I'm not interested in that platform, and I'm mostly interested in games I can package for my Linux distro.

There are also this one which was mentioned in this forum: Dungeon Story (MIT) viewtopic.php?f=22&t=5580&p=61740

Simon Tatham's puzzles are on iOS.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simon-t ... 20631?mt=8

Taknamay {l Wrote}:Simon Tatham's puzzles are on iOS.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/simon-t ... 20631?mt=8

Indeed, it's a third party port and is hosted on GH: https://github.com/ghewgill/puzzles

Thank you for the GitHub link! Actually, I cloned the wrong repository (git://git.tartarus.org/simon/puzzles.git): I didn't thought of a third party port.

Among others things, I'm wondering if our CC-BY license for the images may cause the app to be rejected, and if other iOS apps include CC-BY licenses.

Whoa, so many platformers on KOBUGE's repository! The idea of a “1 hour challenge” for Ninja-Training is quite impressive. I'm still struggling with the submission to Apple this evening, but I'm looking forward to have a deeper look

Updates:
- Yesterday, Apple accepted our last build for external testing (up to 2000 people). If you'd like to give a try, you can drop me an e-mail at: info [at] paulronga [dot] ch and I'll send you an invite (you need to have an iPhone, iPad or iPod with iOS 9.1+).
- In May, I spent a lot of time fixing all kind of issues. The worst was a function which took 4 seconds to execute, but didn't throw any error or warning:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

[UIFont fontWithName:@"Gill Sans" size:18]

In fact, I had to type the font name without spacebar (this good blog post explains why):

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

[code][UIFont fontWithName:@"GillSans" size:18]

- In April, we tried to submit another build for external texting which was rejected because of Guideline 2.10: in fact, any iPhone app must also work on iPad at iPhone resolution (see guideline 2.10 here).

About our motivation throughout time:



Some month ago, a game developer helped us a lot when he draw us a graphic of this kind. I hope it can give you some eager to move forward, too!

Good news: the game is on the App Store! No problem with the LGPL and CC licenses.

We want to be transparent about downloads and will update this file:
itunes_connect_downloads.csv

I started exploring Godot: by chance, there's two plugins to import Tiled files. But we'll have to translate 4000 lines of code and rethink everything with the “complementary scenes” pattern :-)

I am glad you made it, I really like open games without a predetermined story like "some adventure games and strategy games, they feel more real. I especially like strategy games because of this, if you want to create more games (and I hope you will =)) there is an excellent game you could look to, that have just begun to play that's called age of strategy and you can really DO A LOT.
Ps sorry for the grammar English isn't my first language

Age of Strategy looks really nice! Not “libre” unfortunately, but it looks good on mobile. There is many excellent FOSS strategy game, as a child I played Freeciv a lot, The Battle of Wesnoth is also really good and evolved a lot over time.

Some good news: a Songwriter made great sound effects and original music for the game, which are CC-BY as the other art assets. I’ve pushed them to the repository and we’ll publish an update soon.