source: https://github.com/BazkieBumpercar/GameplayFootball
binaries: http://properlydecent.com
data files: http://properlydecent.com/data/gameplayfootball/
The license of the data files are unclear.
The game is fun as-it-is, and could also serve as a good reference / starting point for future projects (a good one would be rewrite the game to use another engine, instead of the abandoned engine it was developed on).
Original post, for historical purposes
Don't know if any one here knows about Gameplay Football. It was a one-person project that recently got discontinued (full history here).
What the single developer achieved on it is incredible and would be a shame to loss all his efforts. The author seems - although favourable - hesitant to release it as free software (with arguments we seen a lot of times in all those years in a lot of different projects by a lot of different developers):I often got the suggestion I should open source the project. I like the idea, but in this case I've been hestitant, first of all because I'm not very good at working together on code, but mostly, because the code is so messy and badly documented. I feel if I would release the code, it would just transfer this 'oh my, I'm working on an overly complex house of cards'-feeling to other developers, and I don't want to do that. Also, I would get a lot of questions (How does this or that function? What does this code do exactly?) and I don't want to become a helpdesk
As a free game development community, what could we do? Maybe send him some sort of message trying to convince him that releasing the now abandoned code would be of great interest for the community itself (not just for the free software community, but also for the community already created on this game)? But what arguments should we use? Do you believe it worth a try?