Free Software Replacement for "Kick the Buddy"

[Jastiv]

My son is all enamored with this horrible game called "kick the buddy." It involves a rope dummy that makes sounds and says stuff. You can *kill* him various ways including weapons, animals, guns bombs, weather effects plants etc etc. Its for the cell phone (I know they have it on android. I really hate it for a couple of reasons. Basically, as you beat him up you get money, and every so often you get gold. You have to watch a lot of ads, (more so than other stupid closed source cell phone games) and if you don't want to it is $7.00 a week for the dumb thing. (well, okay $6.99)
He said he saw it on youtube. I think it is popular because of marketing, not because it is particularly good. Also the game play is very easy and the game is very sandbox style without levels so you can unlock things in whatever order you want.

[fluffrabbit]

Yay, an exploitive, overpriced torture sim! I can't wait for this to end up on Dateline NBC.

I thought about making something similar in Flash, 10 years ago. I think the main technical challenges would be the Android API, multitouch, and the 2D physics engine (Box2D comes to mind). The Android issue could be avoided by making a web app. Emscripten is secret sauce and black magic, so it would probably have to be written in JavaScript. Phaser.js is a popular FLOSS engine that has integration with physics engines. (Perhaps Phaser's default "Arcade" engine would be enough.)

Sounds like an interesting project, though I would be surprised to find such a thing in the open source world as opposed to prying into people's wallets.

[fluffrabbit]

Update:

I played around with the Phaser.js physics demos and found to my dismay that the only good ones are those that use Matter.js, a large dependency. I don't like large dependencies, so after searching GitHub for "JavaScript physics" I discovered Planck.js, a zlib-licensed 2D physics library written from scratch to match the Box2D API, and it's still being developed. What really sold me was the Jansen linkage demo. It's awesome.

So, if I were to pursue this dummy project, I would use Planck.js and a custom renderer. I have a decent amount of experience with OpenGL, and the 2D canvas API also works if the performance is tolerable.

[Ntech]

Well, there's lots of ad-free (Flash and HTML) closed-source games on Armorgames (armorgames.com) which are 100% free to play.