Remix This Game — a Free Software Experiment

An anonymous reader writes "REMIX THIS GAME is an experimental game design contest where participants can re-mix and re-cycle my free-software self-published PC game, XONG. XONG is available under permissive licenses allowing remixes and derivative works of the code, graphics, sound effects, and music—even for commercial use. The source code license is the GNU GPL Version 3, and the media is covered by the Creative Commons BY-SA license. No special software or programming experience are needed—XONG has been packaged up so that you can just download the game and edit the graphics/code/music/sounds in place, and re-start the game to see your changes. Plus, it is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux, so you can remix it on whichever OS you use, using whatever programs you like."

Comments

Cool

[krzysz00]

This is great and will most likely show off the extensibility of Lisp to people who don't normally care. Also, why did the author use cells instead of standard CLOS, unlike I'm doing in my common lisp roguelke

Re:Cool

[HadouKen24]

From what I've seen so far:

You control the box. You are trying (among other things?) to kill the things moving around. This seems to be largely done by forcing them into striking bombs (the empty squares). You can use a "puck"--the round circle that bounces back toward the box--to tunnel through the walls, and you can drop "chevrons" that force the enemies to move in the indicated direction. This is especially useful for forcing them to hit a bomb or get trapped in a tunnel.

It's not /that/ arcane. You just have to watch it for a couple minutes.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of an old 8-bit Atari game called Firebug Olga. It had weird gameplay because it was a mix of at least Digdug and Pacman that also let you shoot things after gathering enough doodads on the screen. I think it was one of those weird "demo" or magazine games that made its way around enthusiast groups or something, since I couldn't find much in the way of reference to it.

Now if somebody could remake that one 8-bit tank game where you could build walls and had exploding shells that could also ricochet. (And no, it wasn't Atari's Combat Tank game.) I think that one was from Antic Magazine. Despite its quirkiness and simplicity, it was quite fun in multiplayer. So it'll also need an online mode.

Re:Can anyone tell me

[ksandom]

I haven't read enough to answer that. However looking at the bigger picture, I do think this sort of stunt would be good for getting more people working on open source software. Inspire them with something that is immediately fun and rewarding, and trigger the curiousities to try something deeper later on. I wouldn't be at all surprised to talk to someone 5-10 years from now and hear that something like this was their first project.

Re:Suggestions for XONG remixers

[Scrameustache]

This game at first glance appears to be a take on an early roguetype; however in truth it's less adventureish, gear-based or as rich with chance taking. It's quirky though:

You control a vulnerable white square attempting to infiltrate a semi-randomly generated abstract color field environment infested with robots. You are armed with a paint-absorbent hockey puck that can pick up color and transfer it to other objects. If you lose your puck, you have to find another; these are scattered through the environment and look like the letter P. There are no hit points; any hit kills you, and completely ends your game. You cannot shoot enemies; instead you drop direction-changing arrows called "chevrons" to guide them to their doom in one of XONG's many black holes. But your puck will also follow the arrows, so be careful where you fire; otherwise you'll lose it down a black hole.

Oh, so THAT's what's going on... I went to see their "Gameplay video with commentary, at youtube" and I had no clue as to what the hell I was looking at. This is some very, very nerdy stuff, and that's coming from a fairly nerdy guy. ASCII characters as game sprites... party like it's 1989!

Re:Kudo's for the new approach

[Anonymous Coward]

No claim to uniqueness of license was made, in fact the page links to the stock gplv3 and cc-by-sa 3.0 usa.

In slashdot where everything is free this might not seem like news, but in the Indie Game Development world source is often closed and assets are very rarely licensed to allow derivative works, let alone commercial use. As an INDIE contest I actually consider this relatively unique.

"Edit in place" works here because we ship the SBCL compiler in the binary----so remixers changes to the .lisp files are recompiled to machine code. We do not have to ship any special dev tools.

To sum up, indie game remixes may not be a new idea, but people don't seem to be licensing their indie games remixably in the first place.

Perhaps this story can raise awareness about that??

Re:how is this any better than the Quake3 source c

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this insightful. This anonymous coward has no insight at all. Quake3 is actually very hard and time consuming to modify. Try adding a new character, a new skin, a new model, a new object, a new weapon.

All of these things require a lot of assets and often actual coding. It is very difficult to do much with quake3 and the fact that it is 3D knocks out anyone who is doesn't under linear algebra.

A 2D roguelike is very simple.

Re:Some comments from XONG's author

[SquarePixel]

Hello folks, I have addressed the originality (or alleged lack thereof) of the remix contest in another message here.

I chose XONG because it's a small and relatively simple game, so it would be easier to get started remixing. There is a review of Xong here: http://playthisthing.com/xong

And, folks, the game includes a thorough HELP screen on the F1 key, and an interactive in-game tutorial. So if the videos seem inscrutable, try reading the instructions.

I make no claim to the engine or game being the greatest ever, but I hope the contest will be fun and get people possibly involved with creative commons licensed art, or free software, or lisp game dev. Who knows?

While I do really appreciate your effort and ideas, theres a few things you should look at first.

1) The game looks like from the 80's. It doesn't make a good impression and is hard to get people involved. Hell, some of the games I coded at 12-13 year old had a lot better graphics and ideas (no offense to you, just good old critical comment if you want it!)

2) Are there any tools to help change the game? There is and have been already immersive modding community out there. You have to provide similar tools, just being "open source" doesn't really do much.

As a person working in the games industry, and who has coded since 8 years old and working in freeware/shareware, indie, and commercial industry, I really think you need more to accomplish your goals.

Re:If this is supposed to show off Lisp

[dyingtolive]

To be fair, my first thought was: "Eew gross, Lisp." My second thought was, "Wait, you can even DO stuff like this in Lisp?"