Ask HN: Favourite Open Source Game?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • crawl

    Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup official repository

    After years of playing it and putting probably thousands of hours into Angband, I switched to Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (https://crawl.develz.org/) and I love it to bits.

    Text mode, turn based dungeon crawlers aren't for everyone, but I love them: they are very tactical, but don't feel like a typical tactics game, have a fun fantasy based lore, and are just a blast. And most importantly, you can pause and quit at any given moment, and continue just as easily.

  • OpenRA

    Open Source real-time strategy game engine for early Westwood games such as Command & Conquer: Red Alert written in C# using SDL and OpenGL. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD and Mac OS X.

    OpenRA

    https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA

    I wish the developer of ChronoDivide would open source their code. I read it was implemented in TypeScript.

    https://chronodivide.com/

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • warzone2100

    Command the forces of The Project in a battle to rebuild the world after mankind has been nearly destroyed by nuclear missiles. A 100% free and open source real-time strategy game for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD+

    I'm not sure it qualifies, as it was open sourced posthumously, but Warzone 2100 https://wz2100.net/ - was so original I've never played any other game with similar mechanics.

  • wesnoth

    An open source, turn-based strategy game with a high fantasy theme.

    The Battle for Wesnoth: https://www.wesnoth.org/

    It hits the sweet spot between simplicity and depth for me, like Advance Wars.

  • pioneer

    A game of lonely space adventure

  • infon

    Infon Battle Arena

    Oh wow. Didn't expect anyone to remember. It was fun to program that one as the programming game for our local hacker conference and then seeing players compete. At some point later IIRC someone even wrote an somewhat advanced AI and created a small paper for it. The game should still be usable, but didn't get any love for a while now.

    Fun anecdote: infon itself is a followup to my own teen programming project written in Quick Basic (see https://github.com/dividuum/infon/wiki/History) and all the Lua embedding and experience I gained from it ultimately ended up being used in a followup project (info-beamer) which is now at the core of my own company and my full-time job.

    So write more games everyone!

  • BrogueCE

    Brogue: Community Edition - a community-lead fork of the much-loved minimalist roguelike game

    Since we're talking about roguelikes, Brogue[0] is awesome as well.

    [0]: https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • unknown-horizons

    Unknown Horizons official code repository

    To add to the list:

    Unknown Horizons https://unknown-horizons.org/

    Globulation https://globulation2.org/wiki/Main_Page

    Widelands https://www.widelands.org/wiki/Download/

    All playable games, from an engine and artwork point of view. Don't expect much in terms of storytelling campaigns.

  • OpenTTD

    OpenTTD is an open source simulation game based upon Transport Tycoon Deluxe

  • widelands

    Widelands is a free, open source real-time strategy game with singleplayer campaigns and a multiplayer mode. The game was inspired by Settlers II™ (© Bluebyte) but has significantly more variety and depth to it.

    A link for people who might be interested: https://www.widelands.org

  • EmptyEpsilon

    Open source bridge simulator. Build with the SeriousProton engine.

    Empty Epsilon bridge simulator: https://github.com/daid/EmptyEpsilon

    The game itself is fun, but the best stuff I've seen is it being reused, modified, and adapted for LARPs and crowdplay.

    Out of Orbit is a great and ongoing example, a Finnish escape room-ish experience that also has a Twitch game putting stream chat in the role of the ship's AI: https://outoforbit.fi/ and https://www.twitch.tv/outoforbitgame/about

    Empty Epsilon powers the game part, with integrations using its DMX interface and HTTP API to provide hardware interfaces and things like Twitch chat commands modifying the game state.

  • teiserver

    Middleware server for online gaming

  • Spring RTS game engine

    A powerful free cross-platform RTS game engine. - Report issues at https://springrts.com/mantis/ (by spring)

  • ddnet

    DDraceNetwork, a free cooperative platformer game

    and its mod ddnet https://ddnet.tw

    I've been playing for a full on decade, the game was your typical third person shooter but around 2015 a mod came out that allowed fast completion of puzzle like maps, then it diverged and it now has two versions. Everyone mostly sticks to its ddnet counterpart. but the quake style, deathmatch/ctf/team is still fun at times. though nobody plays it.

  • oolite

    The main Oolite repository.

  • Mindustry

    The automation tower defense RTS

  • asteroids

    Discontinued Asteroids reincarnation (hard-way) (by siberianbot)

    Recently, I found myself tired of most games, so I wrote one: https://github.com/siberianbot/asteroids

  • VVVVVV

    The source code to VVVVVV! http://thelettervsixtim.es/

  • OpenLara

    Classic Tomb Raider open-source engine

  • online-go.com

    Source code for the Online-Go.com web interface

  • cocainediesel

    OFFICIAL COCAINE DIESEL REPOSITORY

    cocaine diesel. code originally based on qfusion but most of it removed and rewritten including a new renderer from scratch. its a FPS that highly stylized and it has a bomb defusal game mode and loose concept of classes and loadouts

    https://cocainediesel.fun/

  • Teeworlds

    A retro multiplayer shooter

    > A retro multiplayer shooter

    > Teeworlds is a free online multiplayer game, available for all major operating systems. Battle with up to 16 players in a variety of game modes, including Team Deathmatch and Capture The Flag. You can even design your own maps!

    https://www.teeworlds.com

  • CorsixTH

    Open source clone of Theme Hospital

  • lsd

    LSD - line-square-dot: an addicting game (by franzenzenhofer)

  • osu

    rhythm is just a *click* away!

    osu!lazer: https://github.com/ppy/osu

    Official open source reimplementation of the rhythm game osu!classic that is planned to replace it. It's mostly equivalent except in that you can't submit competitive scores online.

    Osu probably has one of the biggest communities surrounding an open game, with some ~15 million active players around the world.

  • superstartrek

    The 70s Super Star Trek command line game revived as an HTML 5 app

  • shelob

    Angband on the web

  • StarRuler2-Source

    4X Space Strategy game Star Ruler 2's open source distribution.

  • Cataclysm-DDA

    Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead. A turn-based survival game set in a post-apocalyptic world.

    Fantastic game and very actively developed. If you play the latest experimental version it can get a bit chaotic with the rate of change in the game. It’s quite different than what I played six months ago. Being able to play a cave man who works his way through the Iron Age or a modern mad max customizing his death mobile. I’m not a fan of every change, but it trends towards realism and simulation and overall keeps getting better.

    https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA

  • SRB2

    SRB2 2.2 Public

  • ivan

    Iter Vehemens ad Necem - a continuation of the graphical roguelike by members of http://attnam.com

    IVAN (https://github.com/Attnam/ivan)

    A rougelike where you can have your legs severed, pray to a god to have them regenerated and have them regenerated as bananas.

  • xgalaga-sdl

    A port to SDL 2 of XGalaga

  • tiled

    Flexible level editor

    Wow, The Mana World still is actively used? That's pretty cool. Also a weird Baader-Meinhoff moment, I just saw Thorbjørn Lindeijer last weekend at the 40th birthday of a mutual friend, and we briefly talked about when we were still studying together and he, his brother Frode and a few other guys just started that project.

    Funny how that project directly lead to Tiled

    https://www.mapeditor.org/

  • counterfeit-monkey

    Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short

    Various old skool text adventures:

    If you are already experienced with them then "Counterfeit Monkey" takes it to the next level with a great twist based on anagram-like magic:

    > Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.

    > Since then, Atlantis has been the world's greatest center for linguistic manipulation, designing letter inserters, word synthesizers, the diminutive affixer, and a host of other tools for converting one thing to another. Inventors worldwide pay heavily for that technology, which is where a smuggler and industrial espionage agent such as yourself can really clean up.

    > Unfortunately, the Bureau of Orthography has taken a serious interest in your activities lately. Your face has been recorded and your cover is blown.

    > Your remaining assets: about eight more hours of a national holiday that's spreading the police thin; the most inconvenient damn disguise you've ever worn in your life; and one full-alphabet letter remover.

    > Good luck getting off the island.

    https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=aearuuxv83plclpl

    https://github.com/i7/counterfeit-monkey

    If you're new to the genre then "Lost Pig" is a good place to start, though technically it's licence (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0) is not open source.

  • xbattleai

    xbattleai-1.2.2 http://www.lysator.liu.se/~mbrx/XBattleAI/download.html

    XbattleAI did a TCP connection version, I can't remember if it was good enough. See. https://github.com/robertjschulz/xbattleai

    The closed source javascript game https://generals.io is a good simplification of XBattle, I've seen one OSS server reimplementation of it.

    If you can find the code fir Europa I'm interested, I think it was released as OSS but I couldn't find it when looking around.

  • 0ad

    Git mirror of the 0 A.D. source code (http://trac.wildfiregames.com/browser)

  • RTanque

    RTanque is a game for (Ruby) programmers. Players program the brain of a tank and then send their tank+brain into battle against other tanks.

  • space-station-14

    A multiplayer game about paranoia and chaos on a space station. Remake of the cult-classic Space Station 13.

    Space Station 14 [0], which is the remake and spiritual successor to Space Station 13, mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

    SS13 is a wonderful game, but it's so old and its codebase is so messy that people have been trying to remake it for years. Attempts had mostly gone nowhere until all of a sudden SS14 took off with a few dozen OSS developers. Now they're making fantastic progress (see [1]) and have a game that isn't just playable, but enjoyable! (Not to mention being almost completely on-par with SS13 at this point, with several distinct maps and hundreds of items ported over.)

    [0]: https://spacestation14.io

  • xonotic

    For anyone wondering, Xonotic is still very actively developed despite the lack of releases.

    https://gitlab.com/xonotic

    If you want to run latest without compiling yourself: https://gitlab.com/xonotic/xonotic/-/wikis/Autobuilds

  • shapez.io

    shapez.io is an open source base building game inspired by factorio! Available on web & desktop (by Sense101)

    shapez.io [1] - It's is great game inspired by Factorio. I would describe it as a minimalist Factorio-light.

    [1]: https://shapez.io/

  • Unciv

    Open-source Android/Desktop remake of Civ V

    I've been enjoying Unciv on my phone recently. It's a FOSS port of Sid Maier's Civilization V.

    https://github.com/yairm210/UnCiv

  • etlegacy

    ET: Legacy is an open source project based on the code of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory which was released in 2010 under the terms of the GPLv3 license.

    ET:Legacy [1], initially it (the original) wasn't open-source but it is now. Never gets old.

    [1]: https://www.etlegacy.com/

  • openscope

    openScope Air Traffic Control Simulator

    I don’t know if it’s my favorite open source game, but it’s the only one I know of.

    1. https://github.com/openscope/openscope

  • bitburner

    Bitburner Game

    BitBurner. Its an incremental game, which means you do some work, get to a point of diminishing returns, cash out with some upgrades and restart. Each time you restart you get a little further. Normally these types of games are super boring, but everything in BitBurner has an API.

    Eventually the game gets super complex - stock markets, gangs, automations, combat systems, corporate espionage, etc. Its got a healthy open source community and discord as well

    https://github.com/danielyxie/bitburner

  • Fable: F# |> BABEL

    F# to JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Rust and Dart Compiler

    Yes all the time, my go to topic for learning new techs is usually hexes (I don't know why I'm obsessed with HexMaps...). Anyway when I dabbled with F# I did exactly this, browserize it with Fable(https://fable.io/).

  • alephone

    Aleph One is the open source continuation of Bungie’s Marathon 2 game engine.

  • BrowserQuest

    Discontinued DEPRECATED - A HTML5/JavaScript multiplayer game experiment

  • A Dark Room

    A Dark Room - A Minimalist Text Adventure

    A Dark Room - https://github.com/doublespeakgames/adarkroom

    I actually added a JS audio engine to play sound effects, ambience, etc. and it made it into the official browser version of the game.

    http://adarkroom.doublespeakgames.com

  • flare-game

    Fantasy action RPG using the FLARE engine

    > Dungeon Crawl

    This is a favorite. And just to add, after I got a bit tired of roguelikes I tried out Flare and got hooked on the old version in my distro's repos. Later I found it is still under active development and really fun, with a greatly improved base campaign and community mods available as well.

    Be sure to get the AppImage rather than whatever might be in older repos if you're running Linux.

    https://flarerpg.org/

    Recent presentation: https://flarerpg.org/2022/02/21/i-love-free-software-day-202...

    Blog: https://flarerpg.org/blog/

    Forums: https://opengameart.org/forums/flare

  • ppl-utils

    Utility for creating custom PewPew Live levels.

    PewPew Live.

    It's similar to geometry wars. It has lots of game modes, great controls, and great music.

    https://pewpew.live/

  • NXEngine

    A port of the open-source rewrite Cave Story game engine for various platforms. Original author is Caitlin "rogueeve" Shaw, https://nxengine.sourceforge.io/

    I really enjoy Cave Story, It's a very cute metroidvania with a lot of soul.

    https://github.com/EXL/NXEngine

  • nxengine-evo

    nxengine refactoring

    NXengine (or nxengine-evo), an open source engine that can be used to play cave story. Apart from some minor bugs a really good way to experience the game. https://nxengine.sourceforge.io/ https://github.com/nxengine/nxengine-evo

    All of these are games I've put countless of hours into. There's a bunch of other good games, SuperTux, Pingus, Tux Racer, Neverball/neverputt, Minetest, 0ad, some of the KDE games, and more that I've played and liked but haven't lost nearly as much time with.

  • stepmania

    Advanced rhythm game for Windows, Linux and OS X. Designed for both home and arcade use.

    Stepmania, DDR-like rhythm game. You know the drill. https://www.stepmania.com/

  • esports-for-engineers

    Providing linux scripts, documentation and bug fixes to revitalize classic engineering simulation games. The games are organized into a week-long eSports & mindsports decathlon.

    Nobody's mentioning old commercial games that were later released by their publishers as open source. One example is the classic combat flight sim "Rowan's Battle of Britain", initially released in the year 2000. You can find it packaged to run under linux/wine, along with other free games, here:

    https://github.com/sim-museum/esports-for-engineers

    the source code is here:

  • BOB_Src

    Rowan's Battle of Britain source

  • SSVOpenHexagon

    C++20 FOSS clone of "Super Hexagon". Depends on SSVStart, SSVEntitySystem, SSVLuaWrapper, SSVMenuSystem, JSONcpp, SFML2.0. Features JSON/LUA customizable game files, a soundtrack by BOSSFIGHT, pseudo-3D effects.

    https://github.com/vittorioromeo/SSVOpenHexagon

    Space Station 13 (and the remake, SS14) is an incredibly unique and feature rich multiplayer role playing game that takes place on a rickety space station in a wacky retro-futuristic setting. It's hard to recommend this game as the learning curve is more like a cliff, but it is far and away the best game that exists for creating unique (and often very funny) stories in. It has a long and complicated open source history that has fragmented it into several unique popular forks, but the most popular one that's fully open source nowadays is tgstation.

  • tgstation

    The /tg/station branch of SS13.

    https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation

    On that topic I've been playing an SS13-inspired browser based game lately. It's fully open source and takes inspiration from Melvor Idle, but is a much shorter and nicely compacted experience.

  • space-station-13-idle

  • dominus

    Dominus - Multiplayer Social Strategy Web Game

  • SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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