It a grand scale RTS game with robots and insects loosely inspired by Total Annihilation.
Holy shit, this looks awesome! Maybe I can scratch that TA itch - thanks!
I've really enjoyed it.
If you like Supreme Commander, you will be sooo very happy with this.
Cataclysm DDA Is THE open world zombie survival experience. So long as you like obtuse roguelikes with nearly no graphics.
Although Im obviously biased what with being a dev and all.
CDDA is mind bogglingly cool. I play a weekend of it every few months. I know it won't ever happen, but if it got the Dwarf Fortress Steam treatment one day, it could be the last game I ever bought and I'd be happy.
A really nice rogue-like, among the best Android games I know, it’s still fun after all those years and very actively developed !
Great classical roguelike
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead has been mentioned so I'll add OpenMW to the thread. It's a open source engine rewrite of Morrowind and requires the base game to run Morrowind but it has the potential to be used to create new games and the devs are looking to expand it to allow the creation of ARPGs as well.
Another worthy mention is Endless Sky, it's an open source game inspired by the classic space trading and combat game Escape Velocity.
Endless Sky was surprisingly addictive to me, it really scratched the exploration itch. Sadly I played through most content at some point, so now I'm waiting for there to be enough new stuff for me to play again. I really enjoyed it, including the stories and lore and universe!
I also played through most of the content at some point, but when they eventually updated with new content I couldn't get back into it. Maybe I should try again because that was such a fun game.
Since you mentioned OpenMW I thought I should mention Daggerfall Unity. It's an rewrite of Daggerfall using the Unity engine, also requiring the original files. The best thing about is that the developers have made it easily moddable and a very healthy modding community has sprung up for it, some of which really make the game feel like what the original developers were going for but had to deal with the technical limitations of the time.
I will say that 0 A.D. and veloren are my favourites!
Here's a good start.
Fillets-ng (sokoban puzzler)
Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection (sgt-puzzles)
Sauerbraten (FPS)
0 A.D. (RTS)
Holotz Castle (platformer)
Xmoto (motorbike trials riding)
Kobodeluxe (shmup)
Neverputt (minigolf)
If you like RTS games similar to Total Annihilation, you should definitely check out Beyond All Reason, it's gorgeous and fun: https://www.beyondallreason.info/
Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. I sank way too many hours into this (started off as a TA clone but branched off into other game modes too) a decade or two ago, and it looks like it’s still going.
Spring is dead. The fork Recoil is going strong and fast. :-)
Another supcom similar is zero-k. Didn't know there were so many open source options!
Available on steam or at https://zero-k.info/
ZeroK uses the same engine as BAR, my game, and quite a few others. 😋 And yes, definitely should check out ZK, it's a mature project with a nice community and awesome devs.
Recoil is pretty much the only foss engine purpose built for modern rts games of all types.
Did you guys tried Endless sky? Awesome game if you love space
And minetest+mineclone2 is pretty good if you want to play minecraft but don't have a license
Thank you for this! I have already logged hours playing with my kid since seeing your suggestion. We have only played mineclone2 so far. I will look into veloren next.
Nice to hear it! Mineclone is actually very good mod and you definitely should try veloren, good luck
Minetest in general has such a good mod selection it’s insane! My siblings and I never fail to have a good time goofing around with the plugins people have created.
Duelyst was a very popular online card game that shutdown around 3 years ago. The developers have recently released it into the public domain (via CC0 license).
You can completely selfhost a private instance (repo has a good straight forward guide)
There is a public instance available to try https://duelyst.org/. Though it might be pretty barren.
There is also a closed fork which should have a more active userbase https://duelyst2.com/, the game rules are a little different (draw 2 vs draw1), but should have more users to get a feeling for the game.
The game in a nutshell is basically Hearthstone on a chessboard. It’s very fun and approachable and in my opinion one of the best cardgames right next to MagicTCG :). Hopefully the community for it will grow more and we can have a sort of second renaissance for it :)
I seriously think that every online only game should have to make the server assets public if they've abandoned it longer than 10 years. So many good games are just lost to time.
You have my attention
Battle of Wesnoth. Haven't played it in a while, but I remember spending hours playing that at one point.
And there are so many campaigns, it is incredible.
Warzone 2100 is an RTS from 1999 that went open source at some point and can be played on just about anything. It's unit design functionality is really cool and I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic worlds.
I haven't seen any incremental games get posted. They aren't exactly traditional games, but so many of them are open source like Antimatter Dimensions or Synergism. Bitburner is a unique one as an incremental hacking sim, since it relies on actual scripting to grow and automate tasks.
Teeworlds. There are some great community made modes for it like FNG and DDrace. Be sure to download it from ddnet.tw to access to extra features created by the community.
I didn't know DDrace was open source, that's cool. It's a really cool game highly recommend it!
Classic roguelikes have the most longetivity for me. Crawl, Brogue, Nethack.
ADOM was always my favourite, but Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is my go-to these days.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon on android is also fantastic and has wonderful touch screen controls.
This. I just keep coming back to nethack.
Tux Racer. Hands down.
Veloren is inspired by games such as Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft.
You can play single player or multi-player, standalone or use an online server, or even host your own server in a Docker container, or on a Raspberry Pi. Plenty of options!
You start by creating your character, you can collect items for your inventory, you can craft items, there are weapons and combat, you develop skills, can tame creatures, you can trade with merchants, you can socialise, and lost more. There is no single, specific goal or focus, and the idea is to keep exploring and have adventures.
The game is community driven and actually updates quite regularly.
It is clearly no clone of Minecraft. It is fun and adventure!
There's not a whole lot of activity around it these days, but Zelda Classic is an engine for Zelda 1 with a number of additions and improvements, that allows for custom maps, tilesets, scripts, items, enemies, etc. etc.
I've whiled away an unreasonable amount of time on quests that are on par mechanically and quality-wise with Link's Awakening and the Oracle games. Shame I can't get the tarball to work properly on Steam Deck, it's a great fit for that hardware.
Some great games already on here, but wanted to share some love for VVVVVV which released its source a few years ago.
Shapez is a fairly relaxing factory game. Pretty minimalistic style but easy to lose tons of time to if you aren't careful.
Don't think that's an open source game bud
Sure it is, in fact running it yourself is one of the ways to unlock the full game content.
Interesting, do you know how you do that? I've been interested in the game but I don't have a lot of spending money right now
Battle for Wesnoth is a personal favorite of mine that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere in the thread. It's a pixel art, hex-grid turn based strategy game with fantasy armies. It's mixed with mild RPG elements, and there's tons and tons of campaigns and fanmade content accessible directly through a mod browser in game.
The other games I enjoy that I see being mentioned here are in the same vein. BAR, Warzone 2100, OpenTTD. And the open mods based on the STALKER engine, like Anomaly. I love those.
OpenTTD is my drug.
I'm addicted
Now see ive tried that game and it didn't quite stick it's claws into me. What about it is addicting to you?
Came here to comment that game. It's so good, it just brings me back to when I was a kid and played the older, non-Open version, on my first PC. Today, when I actually am old enough to understand all of the mechanics and complexities, it's a very fun and engaging game that you can sit down with a hot mug of tea, and just let it take half of your day away without noticing. It's great!
Warzone 2100. It reminds me of the older Command & Conquer games with a ton of upgrades and customization for your units.
Beyond All Reason is AMAZING. I can't say enough about it. Its my favourite game, and totally annihilates (!) the competition.
Though I guess the competition is pretty small for large scale RTS. Maybe:
Total Annihilation
Supreme Commander
Ashes of the Singularity
Sins of the Solar Empire (sorta)
BAR has fixed all the UI/UX problem, scales well, has a big community, is free, fun, and super deep and complex.
Mindustry is an awesome strategy game that combines Factorio with tower defense.
Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart (ridiculous name I know) is one of the most underrated games ever. It's a super polished, high quality Kart game with an insane amount of mods and maps. The online isn't that populated but the singleplayer time trial is TONS of fun. If you like hunting for medals, it can be a pretty deep rabbit hole. There's a sequel in development but no release date.
GzDoom is the most popular Doom source port and there's a practically infinite amount of user generated content. If you don't know where to start I highly recommend Doom: The Golden Souls Remastered and Castlevania: Simon's Destiny. They're good enough to be premium games.
Mindustry is the bomb
Pokemon Emerald 😉
Simutrans. It's old but really good. It's really easy to lose 10h or so in it before you notice the time.
I remember playing this with a friend. We modified the source code to allow us to use the fast-forward functionality in an online mutiplayer game. Once we figured out how to make proper grade-separated junctions, it ended up becoming quite a tedium. I wish Transport Fever had a multiplayer mode.
Reminds me of OpenTTD. I love the classics
I really enjoy Thrive, it's basically a modern and more scientifically accurate Spore!
Ooh, neat! Thanks for the recommendation!
OpenRCT2, eDuke32, the various Doom and Quake games
Also ScummVM is open source and supports many games
Yo I wasn't expecting to randomly see you here, great work on the Deus Ex randomizer!
Thanks! Yeah I'm really loving Lemmy so far, btw we do have a Deus Ex community
Several, but my number one fav so far is Battle for Wesnoth. An old school hex tile turn based strategy game. Like something out of the 90's or very early 2000's.
Great art, awesome music, solid gameplay, and runs on a potato.
My best friend and I play it whenever we want a casual chill, play n' chat gaming session.
It runs great on the Steam Deck too with a few interface tweaks.
I've installed wesnoth on at least 10 different computers and laptops over the years. My son's enjoying it now, what a classic
Glad he's having fun with it! I hope to share it with my kids one day. :)
Battle For Wesnoth is such a nostalgia hit. Great game too.
Totally!
It is from the 2000s. Its first release was in 2005.
I feel old now, thanks (:
Surprised it's not mentioned here, but Bzflag.
Super fun tank shooter game that doesn't take much to run, and reminds me of a cross between the very old bolo game and Mario kart's battle mode.
There are a few open source game projects I follow. I suppose the most famous one is the Freespace 2 source code project. Although it didn't start open source, the original devs open-sourced it later. It has great support, and a great modding launcher called Knossos. To play the game, even with the source code, you either need the original disks or a copy of the installer from GoG, but it's really cheap. Getting it working on Windows is pretty easy, but Linux is only slightly more complicated. (Fortunately, there's a new launcher that makes it way easier).
If you're interested, let me know.
Have not seen anyone mention one of the best rogue like games out there, Tales of Maj'Eyal
Base game is free to download and play from their website.
Massive world, tons of loot, an incredible number of classes and abilities to combine, it's such a fantastic game that also has native Linux support.
Oof, I have a huge boner for roguelikes, and most of them are open source. My biggest time sink is still Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, playable online at https://crawl.develz.org/
This one is great, I have spent many hours on it!
0.A.D., Veloren and Xonotic are my favorites. Also Sonic Robo Blast 2 is freaking awesome
OpenTTD is good
Endgame: Singularity is a fun (and sometimes very frustrating) small strategy game worth checking out.
The Dark Mod is basically Thief but really well done with a solid amount of (fan) missions to choose from. Speaking of I should play some of it again.
CataclysmDDA is an amazing open source roguelike. Has a bunch of tilesets if you don't like ASCII
What other game you can play as neckbeard otaku on a quest to become a real catgirl in the world infested with zombies and whatnot? God I love Cata
OpenTTD is a great open source clone of the transport tycoon game.
And boohu is an awesome ASCII coffeebreak roguelike.
OpenRA has open source slightly modernized versions of Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn and Dune 2000. There's also Tiberian Sun-like and Red Alert 2 mods for it :)
I'm surprised to not see Flare RPG mentioned. It's nothing groundbreaking on its own, but it's actually got two nicely fleshed out campaigns, and tooling for people to make new ones. It's a nice, fun, FOSS single-player RPG, and it's great if you want that old fashioned Diablo feel.
Another vote for Endless Sky here as well, it's just excellent, and surprisingly expansive.
Oh~ this game looks like someone was really disappoined by how cube worlds dev killed the release on steam i guess. Thanks for that, i will check it out.
tl;dr Game was gutted on steam release but so much more was already done, promised and/or teased.
Tremulous - The game was so fun back then (like 10 years ago ?) I guess it's a dead game now.
Man I miss arena shooters. I feel like Diabotical was the last real hope, awesome game, but releasing on the Epic store killed it.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for me. A classic roguelike with active community and regular updates as well as several forks. It also has a good amount of playable races. From classics like elfs or orcs and dwarves (RIP Mountain Dwarves you were too good for this game) to funky races like Vine Stalkers (sentient parasitic plants) and Armataurs (centaurs but with armadillo parts instead the horse ones) to cats and octopuses.
And the gods you can worship in the game are also very diverse. How about a slime god? Or someone who wants you to wear as much cursed equipment as possible in exchange for knowledge? Or maybe the one who wants everything to move veeery slooow and rewards you for killing mobs that are faster than you?
Technically not the whole game, but Smash Remix is an open source rom hack of the original Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64. It's been a blast from the past and I'm enjoying the hell out of it.
I also love the fact that a lot of N64 emulators are open source too, like Mupen64 or simple64
If you didn't already suggest it, I would have suggested Veloren!
Yep, what's promising about Veloren is I feel like everyone had a pretty cohesive idea of what Cube World was "going to be". It's pretty hard to disappoint a community when the developers are the community.
Oolite | github - an open-world space opera (inspired by classic game Elite)
Kobo Deluxe - 2D scrolling space shooter, destroy star bases with your ship
Open Tyrian - Arcade-style vertical scrolling shooter
I still jump into Quake 3 DeFRaG sometimes. It's a movement game, probably one of the earliest examples of a game / mod where the primary focus is on movement as opposed to shooting or some other mechanic. Its mere existence heavily inspired a lot of source engine movement communities like surf, bhop, kz, etc.
Here's a good video showcasing what DeFRaG movement looks like. Each map is ran on two variations of the physics. One is VQ3 (vanilla quake 3) and CPM (Challenge ProMode Arena, which was originally a Quake 3 mod that heavily altered the physics to make it more fun for professional play). While there's no one DeFRaG game, there's a shitload of open source mods to the original game that modify the physics and allow you to join servers running DeFRaG maps. Some of them even hook up to the online database allowing you to register times without recording your runs and submitting them the traditional way. There's usually a new open source defrag mod rolling out every 3 years or so, and each one builds upon the successes of the previous one. The one I currently use is iDFe which I think came out around 2018 or so? I'm pretty sure there's a new one, and there are other games in the works in both modified Source Engine and Unreal Engine 4 that are looking to emulate the VQ3 and CPM physics for modern engines.
The community is pretty dead, but it rises from the ashes every few years for DFWC (the video I linked above was DFWC 2017). You can always play any one of the thousands of maps in singleplayer too.
edit: I should add, it's not totally open source. You still need to own a copy of Quake 3 (or visit the high seas, at least) because each DF mod requires you to verify your ownership of the game by using a valid CD key. There is a "universal" developer CD key, but I don't remember what it was. When you download defrag you're effectively downloading quake 3, but it's bricked if you don't have the CD key.
I've had a ton of fun in Red Eclipse over the years.
Aside from the other choices already mentioned (especially Doom stuff, FreeDoom ftw) any of the free games derived from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games and early builds, mostly Anomaly and Lost Alpha. There are also a few stabilized versions of the Build 1935 alpha out there which are worth playing and probably a bit more approachable for most people.
Arguable if you can call it a game or not, but there is Overte.
It is an open-source social VR platform. (without crypto so please no pitchforks)
As one of its developers I might be biased, but I wouldn't be one of the developers if I didn't honestly believe in the project.
If reverse-engineered Nintendo games count, then Super Mario 64 and Pokemon Emerald whose engine is technically open source.
EDIT: Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 has been reverse engineered multiple times too.
I was going to recommend Ship of Harkinian as a reverse engineered Ocarina of Time but they don't have a license file posted in their git repo so not technically open source unless I'm just missing it. It uses libultraship which is mit licensed.
Edit: Looks like they started by forking another unlicensed project so until that project chooses a license they don't want to choose a license for themselves. What a mess.
Thanks for the Veloren recommendation, I liked Cube World, it just didn't work out well.
I like supertuxkart and minetest
Seconding Minetest. It's a lot of fun just to poke around the forums and work on my own little projects and additions with minimal actual programming skill required
Veloren
Cube 2 Sauerbraten is pretty good! Free arena shooter with built-in level editor
The original Cube is also fun, at least as a singleplayer game and comes with a lot of SP maps. The SPMP (or MPSP, i don't remember :-P) mode also allows playing the MP maps with randomly spawned bots.
The AssaultCube fork adds more realistic environments (relatively to the original game anyway), though it is fully MP oriented. But you can still play with bots.
Cockatrice for playing TCGs / CCGs online.
Xonotic is a fun quake-like shooter. Highly recommend.
0 A.D. is the closest experience to Empire Earth I've had on the FOSS side. Great fun!
Hum more Age of Empire than Empire Earth I think
The only one Ive played for any length of time is freeciv, which as the name implies is based of the civilization games, mostly civ2. It's a bit old looking these days and setting up multiplayer has always been a bit fiddly, but the gameplay is pretty fun imo.
I always used to love playing Freeciv years ago as I grew up on Civ 2 and Civilisation: Call to Power. Probably should try it out again on a modern OS.
Mindustry is a really fun automation/tower defense game
Second Mindustry, I played it up once and it was great. Basically Factorio for phones.
thirded. played it years ago and got into it again recently. you should check it out again, there's a lot of new stuff they've added.
Beyond All Reason
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
It a grand scale RTS game with robots and insects loosely inspired by Total Annihilation.
Holy shit, this looks awesome! Maybe I can scratch that TA itch - thanks!
I've really enjoyed it.
If you like Supreme Commander, you will be sooo very happy with this.
Cataclysm DDA Is THE open world zombie survival experience. So long as you like obtuse roguelikes with nearly no graphics.
Although Im obviously biased what with being a dev and all.
CDDA is mind bogglingly cool. I play a weekend of it every few months. I know it won't ever happen, but if it got the Dwarf Fortress Steam treatment one day, it could be the last game I ever bought and I'd be happy.
I'll just leave this here ;) https://store.steampowered.com/app/2330750/Cataclysm_Dark_Days_Ahead/
Tilesets are out and many many mods if thats what you mean
Shattered Pixel Dungeon ! And its origin, Pixel Dungeon.
A really nice rogue-like, among the best Android games I know, it’s still fun after all those years and very actively developed !
Great classical roguelike
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead has been mentioned so I'll add OpenMW to the thread. It's a open source engine rewrite of Morrowind and requires the base game to run Morrowind but it has the potential to be used to create new games and the devs are looking to expand it to allow the creation of ARPGs as well.
Another worthy mention is Endless Sky, it's an open source game inspired by the classic space trading and combat game Escape Velocity.
Endless Sky was surprisingly addictive to me, it really scratched the exploration itch. Sadly I played through most content at some point, so now I'm waiting for there to be enough new stuff for me to play again. I really enjoyed it, including the stories and lore and universe!
I also played through most of the content at some point, but when they eventually updated with new content I couldn't get back into it. Maybe I should try again because that was such a fun game.
Since you mentioned OpenMW I thought I should mention Daggerfall Unity. It's an rewrite of Daggerfall using the Unity engine, also requiring the original files. The best thing about is that the developers have made it easily moddable and a very healthy modding community has sprung up for it, some of which really make the game feel like what the original developers were going for but had to deal with the technical limitations of the time.
I will say that 0 A.D. and veloren are my favourites!
Here's a good start.
Fillets-ng (sokoban puzzler)
Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection (sgt-puzzles)
Sauerbraten (FPS)
0 A.D. (RTS)
Holotz Castle (platformer)
Xmoto (motorbike trials riding)
Kobodeluxe (shmup)
Neverputt (minigolf)
If you like RTS games similar to Total Annihilation, you should definitely check out Beyond All Reason, it's gorgeous and fun: https://www.beyondallreason.info/
Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. I sank way too many hours into this (started off as a TA clone but branched off into other game modes too) a decade or two ago, and it looks like it’s still going.
https://springrts.com/
Spring is dead. The fork Recoil is going strong and fast. :-)
Another supcom similar is zero-k. Didn't know there were so many open source options! Available on steam or at https://zero-k.info/
ZeroK uses the same engine as BAR, my game, and quite a few others. 😋 And yes, definitely should check out ZK, it's a mature project with a nice community and awesome devs.
Recoil is pretty much the only foss engine purpose built for modern rts games of all types.
Did you guys tried Endless sky? Awesome game if you love space
And minetest+mineclone2 is pretty good if you want to play minecraft but don't have a license
Thank you for this! I have already logged hours playing with my kid since seeing your suggestion. We have only played mineclone2 so far. I will look into veloren next.
Nice to hear it! Mineclone is actually very good mod and you definitely should try veloren, good luck
Minetest in general has such a good mod selection it’s insane! My siblings and I never fail to have a good time goofing around with the plugins people have created.
Yeah that's cool
https://github.com/open-duelyst/duelyst
Duelyst was a very popular online card game that shutdown around 3 years ago. The developers have recently released it into the public domain (via CC0 license).
You can completely selfhost a private instance (repo has a good straight forward guide)
There is a public instance available to try https://duelyst.org/. Though it might be pretty barren.
There is also a closed fork which should have a more active userbase https://duelyst2.com/, the game rules are a little different (draw 2 vs draw1), but should have more users to get a feeling for the game.
The game in a nutshell is basically Hearthstone on a chessboard. It’s very fun and approachable and in my opinion one of the best cardgames right next to MagicTCG :). Hopefully the community for it will grow more and we can have a sort of second renaissance for it :)
I seriously think that every online only game should have to make the server assets public if they've abandoned it longer than 10 years. So many good games are just lost to time.
You have my attention
Battle of Wesnoth. Haven't played it in a while, but I remember spending hours playing that at one point.
And there are so many campaigns, it is incredible.
Warzone 2100 is an RTS from 1999 that went open source at some point and can be played on just about anything. It's unit design functionality is really cool and I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic worlds.
I haven't seen any incremental games get posted. They aren't exactly traditional games, but so many of them are open source like Antimatter Dimensions or Synergism. Bitburner is a unique one as an incremental hacking sim, since it relies on actual scripting to grow and automate tasks.
Teeworlds. There are some great community made modes for it like FNG and DDrace. Be sure to download it from ddnet.tw to access to extra features created by the community.
I didn't know DDrace was open source, that's cool. It's a really cool game highly recommend it!
Classic roguelikes have the most longetivity for me. Crawl, Brogue, Nethack.
ADOM was always my favourite, but Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup is my go-to these days.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon on android is also fantastic and has wonderful touch screen controls.
This. I just keep coming back to nethack.
Tux Racer. Hands down.
Veloren is inspired by games such as Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft.
You can play single player or multi-player, standalone or use an online server, or even host your own server in a Docker container, or on a Raspberry Pi. Plenty of options!
You start by creating your character, you can collect items for your inventory, you can craft items, there are weapons and combat, you develop skills, can tame creatures, you can trade with merchants, you can socialise, and lost more. There is no single, specific goal or focus, and the idea is to keep exploring and have adventures.
The game is community driven and actually updates quite regularly.
It is clearly no clone of Minecraft. It is fun and adventure!
See https://veloren.net/
Oh I am saving this post! It's a goldmine
There's not a whole lot of activity around it these days, but Zelda Classic is an engine for Zelda 1 with a number of additions and improvements, that allows for custom maps, tilesets, scripts, items, enemies, etc. etc.
I've whiled away an unreasonable amount of time on quests that are on par mechanically and quality-wise with Link's Awakening and the Oracle games. Shame I can't get the tarball to work properly on Steam Deck, it's a great fit for that hardware.
Some great games already on here, but wanted to share some love for VVVVVV which released its source a few years ago.
Shapez is a fairly relaxing factory game. Pretty minimalistic style but easy to lose tons of time to if you aren't careful.
Don't think that's an open source game bud
Sure it is, in fact running it yourself is one of the ways to unlock the full game content.
Interesting, do you know how you do that? I've been interested in the game but I don't have a lot of spending money right now
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Love this traditional roguelike!
Pixel Dungeon! Great rogue like mobile game
Battle for Wesnoth is a personal favorite of mine that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere in the thread. It's a pixel art, hex-grid turn based strategy game with fantasy armies. It's mixed with mild RPG elements, and there's tons and tons of campaigns and fanmade content accessible directly through a mod browser in game.
The other games I enjoy that I see being mentioned here are in the same vein. BAR, Warzone 2100, OpenTTD. And the open mods based on the STALKER engine, like Anomaly. I love those.
OpenTTD is my drug. I'm addicted
Now see ive tried that game and it didn't quite stick it's claws into me. What about it is addicting to you?
Came here to comment that game. It's so good, it just brings me back to when I was a kid and played the older, non-Open version, on my first PC. Today, when I actually am old enough to understand all of the mechanics and complexities, it's a very fun and engaging game that you can sit down with a hot mug of tea, and just let it take half of your day away without noticing. It's great!
Warzone 2100. It reminds me of the older Command & Conquer games with a ton of upgrades and customization for your units.
Beyond All Reason is AMAZING. I can't say enough about it. Its my favourite game, and totally annihilates (!) the competition.
Though I guess the competition is pretty small for large scale RTS. Maybe:
BAR has fixed all the UI/UX problem, scales well, has a big community, is free, fun, and super deep and complex.
Mindustry is an awesome strategy game that combines Factorio with tower defense.
Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart (ridiculous name I know) is one of the most underrated games ever. It's a super polished, high quality Kart game with an insane amount of mods and maps. The online isn't that populated but the singleplayer time trial is TONS of fun. If you like hunting for medals, it can be a pretty deep rabbit hole. There's a sequel in development but no release date.
GzDoom is the most popular Doom source port and there's a practically infinite amount of user generated content. If you don't know where to start I highly recommend Doom: The Golden Souls Remastered and Castlevania: Simon's Destiny. They're good enough to be premium games.
Mindustry is the bomb
Pokemon Emerald 😉
Simutrans. It's old but really good. It's really easy to lose 10h or so in it before you notice the time.
I remember playing this with a friend. We modified the source code to allow us to use the fast-forward functionality in an online mutiplayer game. Once we figured out how to make proper grade-separated junctions, it ended up becoming quite a tedium. I wish Transport Fever had a multiplayer mode.
Reminds me of OpenTTD. I love the classics
I really enjoy Thrive, it's basically a modern and more scientifically accurate Spore!
Ooh, neat! Thanks for the recommendation!
OpenRCT2, eDuke32, the various Doom and Quake games
Also ScummVM is open source and supports many games
Yo I wasn't expecting to randomly see you here, great work on the Deus Ex randomizer!
Thanks! Yeah I'm really loving Lemmy so far, btw we do have a Deus Ex community
https://lemmy.ml/c/deus_ex
(Unfortunately lemmy.ml has been pretty unstable, might have to wait for it to come back before you can subscribe)
Oh snap, subscribing to that.
EDIT: well, once I can actually load it through lemmy.world.
lemmy.ml is up again, you should be able to subscribe now
https://lemmy.world/c/deus_ex@lemmy.ml
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
Several, but my number one fav so far is Battle for Wesnoth. An old school hex tile turn based strategy game. Like something out of the 90's or very early 2000's.
Great art, awesome music, solid gameplay, and runs on a potato.
My best friend and I play it whenever we want a casual chill, play n' chat gaming session.
It runs great on the Steam Deck too with a few interface tweaks.
I've installed wesnoth on at least 10 different computers and laptops over the years. My son's enjoying it now, what a classic
Glad he's having fun with it! I hope to share it with my kids one day. :)
Battle For Wesnoth is such a nostalgia hit. Great game too.
Totally!
It is from the 2000s. Its first release was in 2005.
I feel old now, thanks (:
Surprised it's not mentioned here, but Bzflag.
Super fun tank shooter game that doesn't take much to run, and reminds me of a cross between the very old bolo game and Mario kart's battle mode.
There are a few open source game projects I follow. I suppose the most famous one is the Freespace 2 source code project. Although it didn't start open source, the original devs open-sourced it later. It has great support, and a great modding launcher called Knossos. To play the game, even with the source code, you either need the original disks or a copy of the installer from GoG, but it's really cheap. Getting it working on Windows is pretty easy, but Linux is only slightly more complicated. (Fortunately, there's a new launcher that makes it way easier).
If you're interested, let me know.
Have not seen anyone mention one of the best rogue like games out there, Tales of Maj'Eyal
https://te4.org
Base game is free to download and play from their website. Massive world, tons of loot, an incredible number of classes and abilities to combine, it's such a fantastic game that also has native Linux support.
Unciv! Remake of civV for desktop and Android.
Oof, I have a huge boner for roguelikes, and most of them are open source. My biggest time sink is still Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, playable online at https://crawl.develz.org/
This one is great, I have spent many hours on it!
0.A.D., Veloren and Xonotic are my favorites. Also Sonic Robo Blast 2 is freaking awesome
OpenTTD is good
Endgame: Singularity is a fun (and sometimes very frustrating) small strategy game worth checking out.
The Dark Mod is basically Thief but really well done with a solid amount of (fan) missions to choose from. Speaking of I should play some of it again.
Supertuxkart
absolutely! I'm really impressed with how far it's come along.
OpenRCT if you're counting that style of open source game
For me it's CDDA, a quite realistic and deep apocalyptic survival game with very frequent updates(on the experimental branch)
Unciv civilization 5 replica
Edit: added description
CataclysmDDA is an amazing open source roguelike. Has a bunch of tilesets if you don't like ASCII
What other game you can play as neckbeard otaku on a quest to become a real catgirl in the world infested with zombies and whatnot? God I love Cata
OpenTTD is a great open source clone of the transport tycoon game. And boohu is an awesome ASCII coffeebreak roguelike.
OpenRA has open source slightly modernized versions of Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn and Dune 2000. There's also Tiberian Sun-like and Red Alert 2 mods for it :)
I'm surprised to not see Flare RPG mentioned. It's nothing groundbreaking on its own, but it's actually got two nicely fleshed out campaigns, and tooling for people to make new ones. It's a nice, fun, FOSS single-player RPG, and it's great if you want that old fashioned Diablo feel.
Another vote for Endless Sky here as well, it's just excellent, and surprisingly expansive.
Oh~ this game looks like someone was really disappoined by how cube worlds dev killed the release on steam i guess. Thanks for that, i will check it out. tl;dr Game was gutted on steam release but so much more was already done, promised and/or teased.
Tremulous - The game was so fun back then (like 10 years ago ?) I guess it's a dead game now.
Man I miss arena shooters. I feel like Diabotical was the last real hope, awesome game, but releasing on the Epic store killed it.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup for me. A classic roguelike with active community and regular updates as well as several forks. It also has a good amount of playable races. From classics like elfs or orcs
and dwarves(RIP Mountain Dwarves you were too good for this game) to funky races like Vine Stalkers (sentient parasitic plants) and Armataurs (centaurs but with armadillo parts instead the horse ones) to cats and octopuses.And the gods you can worship in the game are also very diverse. How about a slime god? Or someone who wants you to wear as much cursed equipment as possible in exchange for knowledge? Or maybe the one who wants everything to move veeery slooow and rewards you for killing mobs that are faster than you?
Technically not the whole game, but Smash Remix is an open source rom hack of the original Super Smash Bros. for the Nintendo 64. It's been a blast from the past and I'm enjoying the hell out of it.
I also love the fact that a lot of N64 emulators are open source too, like Mupen64 or simple64
If you didn't already suggest it, I would have suggested Veloren!
Yep, what's promising about Veloren is I feel like everyone had a pretty cohesive idea of what Cube World was "going to be". It's pretty hard to disappoint a community when the developers are the community.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
[https://spacestation14.io/](Space Station 14)
Puzzle
Space
I still jump into Quake 3 DeFRaG sometimes. It's a movement game, probably one of the earliest examples of a game / mod where the primary focus is on movement as opposed to shooting or some other mechanic. Its mere existence heavily inspired a lot of source engine movement communities like surf, bhop, kz, etc.
Here's a good video showcasing what DeFRaG movement looks like. Each map is ran on two variations of the physics. One is VQ3 (vanilla quake 3) and CPM (Challenge ProMode Arena, which was originally a Quake 3 mod that heavily altered the physics to make it more fun for professional play). While there's no one DeFRaG game, there's a shitload of open source mods to the original game that modify the physics and allow you to join servers running DeFRaG maps. Some of them even hook up to the online database allowing you to register times without recording your runs and submitting them the traditional way. There's usually a new open source defrag mod rolling out every 3 years or so, and each one builds upon the successes of the previous one. The one I currently use is iDFe which I think came out around 2018 or so? I'm pretty sure there's a new one, and there are other games in the works in both modified Source Engine and Unreal Engine 4 that are looking to emulate the VQ3 and CPM physics for modern engines.
The community is pretty dead, but it rises from the ashes every few years for DFWC (the video I linked above was DFWC 2017). You can always play any one of the thousands of maps in singleplayer too.
edit: I should add, it's not totally open source. You still need to own a copy of Quake 3 (or visit the high seas, at least) because each DF mod requires you to verify your ownership of the game by using a valid CD key. There is a "universal" developer CD key, but I don't remember what it was. When you download defrag you're effectively downloading quake 3, but it's bricked if you don't have the CD key.
I've had a ton of fun in Red Eclipse over the years.
Aside from the other choices already mentioned (especially Doom stuff, FreeDoom ftw) any of the free games derived from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games and early builds, mostly Anomaly and Lost Alpha. There are also a few stabilized versions of the Build 1935 alpha out there which are worth playing and probably a bit more approachable for most people.
Arguable if you can call it a game or not, but there is Overte. It is an open-source social VR platform. (without crypto so please no pitchforks)
As one of its developers I might be biased, but I wouldn't be one of the developers if I didn't honestly believe in the project.
If reverse-engineered Nintendo games count, then Super Mario 64 and Pokemon Emerald whose engine is technically open source.
EDIT: Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 has been reverse engineered multiple times too.
I was going to recommend Ship of Harkinian as a reverse engineered Ocarina of Time but they don't have a license file posted in their git repo so not technically open source unless I'm just missing it. It uses libultraship which is mit licensed.
Edit: Looks like they started by forking another unlicensed project so until that project chooses a license they don't want to choose a license for themselves. What a mess.
Thanks for the Veloren recommendation, I liked Cube World, it just didn't work out well.
I like supertuxkart and minetest
Seconding Minetest. It's a lot of fun just to poke around the forums and work on my own little projects and additions with minimal actual programming skill required
Veloren
Cube 2 Sauerbraten is pretty good! Free arena shooter with built-in level editor
The original Cube is also fun, at least as a singleplayer game and comes with a lot of SP maps. The SPMP (or MPSP, i don't remember :-P) mode also allows playing the MP maps with randomly spawned bots.
The AssaultCube fork adds more realistic environments (relatively to the original game anyway), though it is fully MP oriented. But you can still play with bots.
Cockatrice for playing TCGs / CCGs online.
Xonotic is a fun quake-like shooter. Highly recommend.
If you're into strategy games, OpenTTD! https://www.openttd.org/
It's an open-sourced Transport Tycoon Deluxe, and it never gets old for me!
osu!lazer
I'd say Pokemon Infinite Fusion. It's written in Rails and the artwork is done by the community
0 A.D. is the closest experience to Empire Earth I've had on the FOSS side. Great fun!
Hum more Age of Empire than Empire Earth I think
The only one Ive played for any length of time is freeciv, which as the name implies is based of the civilization games, mostly civ2. It's a bit old looking these days and setting up multiplayer has always been a bit fiddly, but the gameplay is pretty fun imo.
I always used to love playing Freeciv years ago as I grew up on Civ 2 and Civilisation: Call to Power. Probably should try it out again on a modern OS.