Aquaria Goes Open Source 58
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.
Amazing game! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They opensourced the engine, but not the data. (Score:5, Informative)
Quake, Quake 2, et al., are the same way.
Re:Aquaria was pretty cool (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with the sprite was that it was 2D with skeletal animation, which naturally ends up looking like a jumping jack. Alternatives would have been full 3D sprites or lots and lots of hand drawn animations, both much more complicated to do then what it did use.
Re:I have it! (Score:3, Informative)
absolutely. The story is very interesting, and very reminicient of Darek Wu's other games (Like Eternal Daughter.)
The sheer number of hand drawn sprites in the game is astounding. People complain these days that games are all eyecandy, and no gameplay; This one does not go that route. The hand drawn sprites only ENHANCE the gameplay, which is at once both quite fluid, graceful, and dynamic-- and can get outright challenging and extremely difficult, depending on the environment.
I would very much like to see this game ported to other platforms, especially handhelds with analog sticks, like the PSP, or with touch screens, like the NDS.
Re:They opensourced the engine, but not the data. (Score:3, Informative)
Later is exactly it.
I'm not saying that the developer ever will, but if they were to release it as a free download then it's not going to be now, while the game is still generating a few sales.
There's no saying they won't make it free years down the line. In the meantime, bite the bullet and reward them for their hard work with a little hard cash.