I would like some recommendations on libre videogames. I have played 0 A.D., Tyrian, Mindustry, Pixel Wheels and Super Tux Kart. While i enjoyed these games I would like something with a bit of story, or some innovative mechanics but I’m open to anything.
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Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a fun Roguelike for Android.
Oooh I wanna try that.
I tried it several times. But it’s god damn hard!
I have spent many hours on it!
It’s hard to put it away before you completed it. It took me 58 tries.
How? The difficulty ramps up so much after that robot boss that I never managed to get much further than that. Maybe you played an much earlier version?
I think I played Shattered Pixel Dungeon in 2019. I progressed slowly but steadily.
I don’t think I ever completed it. Which is your favorite class? I had most success with the warrior.
My favorite was the archer.
For me the archer is veeery hard to play
I love the pixel dungeon games
Back when I had the time, I sunk a fair bit of time into Battle For Wesnoth. I know they were struggling for a few years, but it looks like they made it through and it’s still active.
“Story” is probably a strong word, but there are campaigns both built-in and user-made. But I mostly spent my time playing multiplayer. The SurvivalX/SXRPG mods were particularly fun for some multiplayer turn-based “hack and slash”.
It is actually slowly being ported to the amazing Godot engine these days. That should really enhance the game in many ways :)
Oh, awesome! I’m glad to hear that both so the game can go on living and because Godot being one of the million and one things I have on my list to at least learn the basics of some day.
Just quickly installed the game and it looks like the SXCollection and SXRPGAddon mods are still around (last updated a year or two ago). Wonder if the rest of my old group wants to relive some old times.
There’s Veloren, an open world Voxel game written in Rust. It’s pretty barebones at the moment but you can keep your eye on it 👀
Yeah, this looks like it could become an awesome open-source MMORPG. No story what so ever though ;)
Whoops I totally ignored the suggestion for a story, sorry about that. In that case, if you have an Android phone you could try Andor’s Trail, although the assets aren’t freely licensed so I don’t know if you’ll mind or not.
Woah that looks great
Games with story are somewhat hard to do in a typical open-source development style, but you can certainly find a lot of older commercial games with open-source engines that would fit the bill. Something like OpenMW or ArxLibertatis. There is also this little game-jam title that is quite fun and does have a story: https://securas.itch.io/sealedbite
Why do you think it is hard to do in libre development?
Sealedbite looks really impressive, I’m going to try and install it one of these days. I’m saving the other two for research, lol.
Open-source development usually takes a longer term perspective and is quite iterative. That doesn’t lend itself well to telling a coherent story and players will not play the story again each time there is a new release. Also if you are making a game for free, it should be fun for you to play as well, no? That is one of the reasons why rogue-likes are popular open sources games, because they are fun for the developers to play as well. Playing your own story driven game usually isn’t fun for the developers (nor testers after the first try).
There is also Pioneer | github. Been ages since I looked at it though, but it’s one of those slow yet unstoppable projects. I remember that there was some story involved in the beginning at least.
While I am at space games, of course FreeOrion. No story though, it’s a 4X-game, but lore on species. I’m glad it doesn’t count the played hours.
Battle For Wesnoth has a story to it.
In development libre games would be Tetraforce and Moonwards.
I can provide links if need be.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
Looks good, is there any screenshot? Are you the developer?
You should look at gameplay videos (from recently cuz the game changes a lot very quickly). No i am not, just a fan
Xonotic is really excellent, it’s evolved from Quake 3 and there’s an active community around it. It’s a blast if you’re into FPS games. Hyper Rogue is an interesting non-Euclidean roguelike game. Tanks of Freedom is an Advance Wars clone, has a bit of a story to it as I recall.
Xonotic is actually running on a highly modified Quake1 engine. Still great multiplayer game.
Oh that’s right!
Flare has a story to it. Also nothing where you’re going to be holding onto the edge of your seat, but enough so that you know where you’re going and why.
You mean OpenTyrian.
A quick look at the LibreGameWiki shows some promising, albeit possibly old, entries like FreeDroidRPG.
anarch is a mess, its ugly, and its wierd, but its damn small and free as fuck. It’s pretty fun to mess around with. Also I see you play mindustry, that game is really satisfying to play.
If you like interactive fiction there is a lot of work out there that’s freely available and runs in free implementations of their parser engines.
For example: Anchorhead a Lovecraftian text adventure
Wesnoth is the only libre videogame I know of that’s game-play feels entirely original without deriving from another game.
edit: Clarified as my original statement was inaccurate.
Then you neither know the prior art of Wesnoth, nor a lot of other libre games :p
I’ve only played with the modern wesnoth art, but the gameplay is completely different from the sega games it’s inspired by.
I haven’t done a ton of libre gaming but compared to most other games in this thread which are clones or heavily inspired by triple A games it stands out.
All of the games mentioned here (that are not literal engine re-implementations) are about as different gameplay wise from the main genre titles that inspired them, as Wesnoth is from its predecessors. I am really a bit tired by this argument propping up whenever open-source games are discussed, as it is simply no different from commercial games, except that open-source games can openly admit that they are inspired by a certain genre lead title without getting into trademark trouble.
I disagree. While there are a couple here I do not recognize the vast majority of these are clearly the outcome of making a game like X but libre, rather than making a game inspired by X that happens to be libre. That’s where I think Wesnoth stands out. Perhaps 0AD as well.
Xonotic? Clearly not. At most it can be described as a hybrid between Quake3 and Unreal Tournament 2004. Hyper Rogue? Like nothing else at all. Tanks of Freedom? A bit like Advance Wars, but game-play differs quite a bit. Flare? Is obviously inspired by Diablo, but not more so than the hundreds of other ARPGs that came after Diablo. Veloren? Inspired by Cube World, but game-play and plans for it (early development) differ quite a bit. And so on and so on.
This seems to be rather a case of ignorance about certain game genres, so that “all arena FPS are clearly a Quake3 clone” which is of course non-sense. Oh and OpenArena is an asset replacement project for Quake3. That is like an engine reimplementation just in reverse.
By the same logic 0AD is clearly an Age of Empires clone. But once you play it, you realize that it is not, beyond some superficial similarities.