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Aquaria Goes Open Source

Posted by Soulskill on from the come-on-in-the-water's-fine dept.

A post on the Wolfire blog yesterday announced that the source code for Aquaria has now been released. Aquaria, an action-adventure, underwater sidescroller from Bit Blot, was part of the Humble Indie Bundle, which was so successful that the developers of four games pledged to release them as open source. This marks the final release, following Lugaru, Gish, and Penumbra: Overture. The source code is available from a Mercurial repository.

5 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Aquaria was pretty cool by Pojut · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Very reminiscent of Ecco the Dolphin. I found it a bit weird that the environments were so awesome looking while the main character looked like it was drawn by a ten year old, but other than that it was a great game. Be sure to check it out.

    --
    Living With a Nerd
    1. Re:Aquaria was pretty cool by sammyF70 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Doing "the body" right now, which I assume to be the last stage of the game, and I must concur : the game, despite being 2D and handdrawn (not a fault in itself, but people might get turned off when they see it initially), is very very good and addictive.

      --
      "DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
  2. Re:They opensourced the engine, but not the data. by Hatta · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If open sourcing the engine (and the level editor) is not a story, how are the people interested in making games with it going to find out about the new tools available?

    --
    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  3. Re:They opensourced the engine, but not the data. by _Sprocket_ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    (I guess it wouldn't work for multiplayer due to the rampant cheating that would ensue ...)

    Quakeworld was an object lesson in this. Very shortly after the Quake source went GPL, you saw speed hacks. There were those in the Quake (specifically Team Fortress) community who believed that this was Carmack's poison pill to finally kill off the game. However, newer server code soon followed that detected speed hacks (among other things). And, for the most part, a game that had already survived numerous cheats before it was Open Source, continued to survive afterwards.

    It should be noted that one of Carmack's discussions around that time was the problem of balancing out latency without trusting the client too much (said trust being the issue that lead to speed hacks).

  4. request by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    so can someone make a version of the game that loads up all the files from a single zip file instead of 4788 tiny files! id software does it, but they just rename the zip to pak.