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Open Source Games

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.
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Aquaria Goes Open Source

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  • by Pojut ( 1027544 ) on Friday June 04, 2010 @05:13PM (#32464512) Homepage

    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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by sammyF70 ( 1154563 )
      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.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by grumbel ( 592662 )

      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.

      • 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.

    • 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.

      • 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
        • 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

          • 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

      • 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 (Score:2, Funny)

    by somersault ( 912633 )

    Yesh

  • Amazing game! (Score:2, Informative)

    by psyque ( 1234612 )
    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!
  • 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.
    • 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 bought the Humble Indie Bundle but haven't downloaded/played this game yet. Should I Slashdot?
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by 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

    • 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 (Score:1, Interesting)

    by 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.

  • by rakslice ( 90330 ) on Saturday June 05, 2010 @01:04AM (#32467174) Homepage Journal

    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?

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