Aquaria Goes Open Source

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.

Aquaria was pretty cool

[Pojut]

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.

Re:

[sammyF70]

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.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[Bat Country]

So attach a debugger and fix it.

Re:

[grumbel]

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:

[ultranova]

Maybe you could use one of those morphing tools that were all the rage a few years back? They were near-realtime even then, and used a kind of skeletal animation as a control rig.

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[drinkypoo]

I found the play control to be amazingly poor. Having to move the mouse so much was frustrating at best. Then again, it was better than Gish, which has genuinely awful control and a terrible tutorial to go with it.

World of Goo is the only finished game in the bundle.

Re:

[mathx314]

You were expecting too much out of the games. Penumbra was a very small team who built their own 3D graphics engine and physics engine and built an incredibly terrifying adventure. Lugaru is a great, if simplistic, brawler written by a single guy (also with its own custom 3D engine). Aquaria's play controls are very good, although mouse controls in general can be a bit frustrating. Gish is... alright I don't like Gish. Still, that's 4/5 games from the pack. Just keep in mind how small these teams were

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Penumbra was a very small team who built their own 3D graphics engine and physics engine and built an incredibly terrifying adventure.

An incredibly buggy one, maybe. I played the Linux version, or tried to. Once I picked up the flashlight the only functions which worked were turning it on and off, ISTR that I could use one of the methods to toggle it but not the other, which is what it was waiting for before it would let me proceed.

Lugaru is a great, if simplistic, brawler written by a single guy (also with its own custom 3D engine).

With poor play control and a typically offensive camera, plus too-realistic textures. It does seem to be a workable 3d engine although it also seems to be too hungry for the number of polys being pushed.

Just keep in mind how small these teams were and what they accomplished.

I'm not

Re:

[sammyF70]

weird. Penumbra worked very well for me (linux too) and I never experienced crashes nor failing functionality.
Lugaru was a turnoff at first. once I understood the controls, it was became a great game. Never had any framerate problems neither (pretty constant subjective >50 fps with an old nvidia8800 at 1680x1050, everything on), but well ... YMMV

People worked hard on those games, and they deliver some very unusual gameplay with some really nice eye candy (Lugaru doesn't really fall in the eye candy depa

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[kalirion]

I found the play control to be amazingly poor. Having to move the mouse so much was frustrating at best.

You can use WASD for movement, and only use the mouse for aiming. This also lets you shoot in a different direction from movement. You can also use a gamepad like the 360 controller, but I prefer keyboard+mouse.

Fish post

[somersault]

Yesh

Re:

[nacturation]

Epic whale.

Amazing game!

[psyque]

I was completely blow away by this game when I bought it in the package. It's very well done and ends with you wanting more. Hopefully with this release the community can create some new stuff and drum up interest in a sequel. Don't have it? Buy it!

Re:They opensourced the engine, but not the data.

[Dan East]

Quake, Quake 2, et al., are the same way.

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[Peach Rings]

The quake sources had at least a few comments though. Aquaria's sources are sprawling and comment-free.

Re:They opensourced the engine, but not the data.

[Haeleth]

This opinion has come up in every story about these games. It's simply wrong. There is plenty that can be done with the code, even while the data remains proprietary.

It would be extremely nice, in fact, if it became common practice for commercial games to have open-source code and proprietary data. That way the creators could still have an obvious way to make money, while the community could take care of making the game run on different platforms etc. (I guess it wouldn't work for multiplayer due to the rampant cheating that would ensue ...)

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[Jahava]

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

This isn't necessarily true. Adding or changing features in the game client may be easier with open-source, but current game cheats / hacks / mods frequently just operate by modifying the binary (static or runtime), netting the same effect. Any well-designed multiplayer game will have sanity checks built into either the central server (if there is one) or by client consensus that will reject (and ban / blacklist) a client that attempts to perform an impossible action.

Merely being open source doesn't really

Re:

[hedwards]

That's patently false. It means you can graft on extensions in places to make the engine do things that you couldn't previously do. Sure, current, cheats / hacks / mods are probably going to work the same, however, this does open things up for new ones that use different servers. But more than that it allows us to choose what systems to port it to.

Re:They opensourced the engine, but not the data.

[_Sprocket_]

(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).

Re:

[h4rr4r]

Or you could port the game and use the resources from the installer.

Basically you could not be more wrong.

Re:They opensourced the engine, but not the data.

[DaleGlass]

Why a non-story? I have the data already, since I bought the game. The source code was what I was missing to be able to make some improvements I've been thinking of.

This is exactly what I wanted, and I didn't expect anything more than that.

If you're the same guy who keeps posting about this on the wolfire blog, just do a favour and stop complaining. If you don't see this as an opportunity for some improvements, then perhaps you're not really able to do any, and what you really want is free of charge game, but that was never promised in the first place.

On my part, all I wanted is the source, I got it, so I'm happy.

The outcome of the humble bundle couldn't have been better IMO, and I'll gladly contribute to any future initiatives of the sort.

Re:

[richlv]

sure, this is great - having the source will provide benefits for the whole industry, even if only in small part.

what would have been mighty cool if they had released data as well... these games would go into default distribution repositories, thus increasing interest in their future versions and linux gaming in general. oh well, maybe later :)

Re:

[Patch86]

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.

Re:

[soppsa]

Lol the furry http://daleglass.net/images/dale_small.png [daleglass.net] plans to make improvements... Does that mean you'll be adding erect penises to all the characters in the WolfFire game?

Re:They opensourced the engine, but not the data.

[Hatta]

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?

Awesome game

[maugle]

This game is amazing. Seriously, if I had known how good it was, I would've thrown in at least another $10 when I bought the Humble Bundle.

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[Jesus_666]

Aquaria was the whole reason I bought the bundle. And it was worth every cent I spent. The rest of the games are just extras and may or may not be entertaining but I'm already satisfied.

I have it!

[Forethought]

I bought the Humble Indie Bundle but haven't downloaded/played this game yet. Should I Slashdot?

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[Anonymous Coward]

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 s

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[Sulphur]

Is there a gateway game then?

Re:

[Jesus_666]

Do you like Metroidvania? It's just like that except with swimming instead of running. Aquaria is all about exploring, finding new abilities and hidden treasure and then using your abilities to explore some more. There is a narrative (and a good one in my opinion) and it may be the first Metroidvania that actually gives you a reason to explore every nook and cranny - curiosity is the driving impulse behind the protagonist's actions and this is narrated very well.

Also, some of the acheivments are really fu

request

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Hooray for Marketeering!

[rakslice]

Hey, I wonder: What's the smallest unit of a software bundle you could open source and still get a front page story on Slashdot?