World of Goo Ported To Linux

christian.einfeldt writes "Lovers of both games and Free Open Source Software will be pleased to see that the popular indie puzzle game World of Goo has been released for Linux. It was designed by a small team of two ex-Electronic Arts developers, Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, who used their entire combined savings of $10,000.00 USD to create the gooey game aimed at guiding goo balls to salvation. The developers built their gooey world with open-source technologies such as Simple DirectMedia Layer, Open Dynamics Engine for physics simulation, and TinyXML for configuration and animation files. Subversion and Mantis Bug Tracker were used for work coordination. Blogger Ken Starks points out that the release of this popular game for Linux could be a big step toward ending the chicken-and-egg problem of a dearth of good games that run natively under Linux."

Comments

Re:Did they actually use all $10K?

[LiENUS]

I think the 10K includes developing all versions of the game, it probably included visual studio and the sdk for the Wii.

Re:Did they actually use all $10K?

[Arthurio]

Where I live there's no such thing as 'unpaid overtime'. Instead by law this is the standard: regular overtime means 1.5x regular pay, overtime on weekends and national holidays means 2x regular hourly pay. Unpaid overtime sounds pretty much like slavery to me. I don't understand how this can be acceptable to anyone.

Re:Lovers of FOSS

[ndogg]

Yup.

Games, however, aren't exactly essential qualities of an OS or even to life.

They're more like artwork, and I am quite willing to pay for good art.

Re:Doesn't work for *all* Linux users

[Haeleth]

I can see why they wouldn't want to spend a lot of time on it

Frankly I'm already amazed they bothered to target Linux/x86, which is already an incredibly tiny games market. Linux/PPC is a fraction of the size of that again! There may well not be more than a few dozen people in the world who (a) use Linux/PPC, (b) don't have a single x86 box they can play games on, and (c) are interested in paying for closed-source games.

but this really looks like nothing more than a cross-compile needed.

Cross-compilation is not always trivial. And then you need to conduct all the testing, etc. And at the end of all that, you might get a handful of sales at most.

The simple truth is that no commercial software company is ever going to target desktop Linux on anything but the most common platforms. If you want to use an unusual processor, you're going to have to stick with free software.

Re:DRM-Less

[Kjella]

Wow, the ministry of truth is out in numbers today. He stated his opinion, so it gets modded down as overrated and gets told it's because he steals so much. I played it, it was fun but it was also fairly repetitative. Doing just a quick search shows that you can get Civilization 4 complete (Civ4, Beyond the Sword and Warlords) for 22$ or Oblivion for 19$. A bit unfair competition maybe against older games that's now in the bargain bin but if you hadn't tried any of them I'd buy either before World of Goo. 20$ is quite okay, but it's nowhere near a bargain and just because it has a native Linux version doesn't make it so either.