What are some great open source games?

popcar2@programming.dev to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 298 points –

I'm usually a fan of open source games but rarely do they manage to be actually great. People like giving recommendations like Super Tux Kart that haven't aged well and don't play well. What are some open source games that are legitimately good that I've missed?

My favorites are:

  • Mindustry

  • Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart

  • Powder Toy

  • GZDoom (and all the amazing mods for it)

  • Veloren (even though it's still in alpha)

108

Battle for Wesnoth

This one never gets the love it deserves. It's a fantastic turn based strategy game with multiple campaigns and storylines, multiplayer, and campaign design tools. It's an old project (started in 2003, IIRC), but it's still fantastic

Hedgewars

Basically, this is Worms but with adorable little hedgehogs instead of, well, worms. Single player is okay, and it has online multiplayer I guess, but the real fun (just like in Worms) is local multiplayer. Also, it has Portal Guns. There's really no downside to this one.

Re-volt io and RVGL

This one's a little iffy. Re-volt was a fantastic R / C racing game with bright graphics, fun tracks, excellent controls, and a killer soundtrack. For good or ill, it was put out by Acclaim, which self destructed in 2004. The Re-volt fan community, however, doesn't know the meaning of the word "quit."

Nowadays, you can join a lively community with regular online tournaments of the game. There's a new cross platform engine called RVGL (that's Re Volt Game Launcher), and metric tonnes of mods and fan content. You still need the original game's assets, though, which is where it's dicey; they're technically abandonware not open source, unless I'm mistaken.

Anyway, links!

Unciv

This project's aim is to be Civilization V, but with more abstract visuals, and, or course, free. In short, it's FreeCiv, but Civ V instead of II and a UI from the 2020s rather than the 80s. (Not throwing shade here; FreeCiv is an amazing project that is exactly what it wants to be!)

If that's not enough to keep ya' happy, I know a few more, but they've mostly been covered by other folks here.

Edit: formatting

I just discovered Unciv on the fdroid store very recently and it blew me away. It is such a well done little Civ 5 clone.

I am definitely going to try Hedgewars. Worms was one of my favorite games when I was a kid.

Thanks so much for the suggestions!

I never even knew about Hedgewars' existence, but Warmux on the other hand... Now that's my childhood right there

I feel you. Warmux was really neat. Sadly, it never got as much development as Hedgewars, even though the mascot theme was really cool. AFAIK, Warmux has been inactive (or at least extremely slow) for years, while Hedgewars has been thriving.

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  • Battle for Wesnoth
  • Tales of Maj'Eyal

Adding to this:

  • Veloren
  • Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
  • Mindustry
  • The Dark Mod
  • Oolite
  • Flare: Empyrean Campaign
  • Xonotic
  • Unvanquished
  • Frozen Bubble

Xonotic is my favorite shooter too date. Just start it up and jump into an instaglib game for grapple hook sniper fun. The other game modes are good too though.

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Tales of Maj'Eyal is a great little game if you're an rogue-like fan! I played so many hours of that game a few years back, it's seriously great!

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Endless Sky.

It's an open world 2D spacefaring game, with a good core story and more being added by the surprisingly-active dev community.

Not without its flaws, but anyway I think it's a fantastic game in its own right. And it's both "finishable" and under continued development & expansion.

It’s surprisingly well written. Both major story arcs had me on the edge of my seat.

Endless Sky is great. It was inspired by the old Escape Velocity games by Ambrosia Software.

My favorites:

  • OpenTTD: Old transport tycoon game, but really fun especially in multiplayer
  • Minetest: Minecraft-like voxel game engine, which means there a many different game modes
  • Beyond All Reason: Great RTS, also great in online multiplayer or with some friends. (Disclaimer: Possible unfree licenses for artwork)
  • Dwarf Fortress (free but not open source, thanks for telling me that one): not everyone’s cup of tea, but sometimes you just get stuck in it for hours on end

Dwarf Fortress is not open source. It is freeware. Parts of the game (some graphics stuff) has the code available but you have no license to distribute it.

Possible unfree licenses for artwork

I'd still consider the game open source, even if the art is copyrighted.

Dwarf Fortress

Is there an open source version? It's a great game (also try the steam edition if you check it out), but I thought it was closed-source.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon and other forks of Pixel Dungeon (but SPD is my fave).

Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a great game if you are into rogue-like games. Expect to die waaaay more than you win. There is a lot of depth and quite a few ways to solve the the puzzles and enemy encounters.

The developer has done an amazing job picking up where the original developer of Pixel Dungeon left off. Very consistent and solid updates and has plenty of plans for future updates which look interesting.

There are plenty of forks ranging from adjusting difficulty to overhauling the art or expanding the gameplay significantly. If you ever get bored, you can just try something new.

I've enjoyed the growth of this game over the years after the development of the original game stopped.

Yes, I love that the dev is so engaged. He also started up a community here for Pixel Dungeon as well.

I'm glad Shattered csme along. I didn't care for item degradation that the original dev of PD built in towards the end. Shattered forked at just the right time.

Sprouted PD is fun if you enjoy grinding.

Does open source implementation of proprietary game counts? OpenMW

We only reimplemented the engine, not the game. You still need to own a copy of Morrowind so there's something for the new engine to actually run. That said, it is possible for it to run other potentially-open-source games, such as OpenMW's example suite (which isn't finished enough to even call a game yet) or the Robowind demo (which I can't remember the licencing details of) .

I have wasted almost as many hours in OpenMW as I have with the official engine. It is just that good.

OpenTTD. IMO mindustry, for example, is better but it's still worth to try OpenTTD

I've played this game so much as a kid. It's nice to see that this game is still maintained (as OSS) and still being mentioned. :)

osu! is an amazing rhythm game. Try osu!lazer, it's the new client: https://osu.ppy.sh/home/download

I also like Pioneers and Endless Sky, both space sims.

This might not count, but both Lichess, a chess website, and OGS, a Go website are open source.

There is also Mindustry, but I haven't played it.

Not only is Endlessly open source, it has been crowd developed for years and years. It's still actively adding user content (stories, outfits, ships, races, etc) and has the only actually functional launcher I've ever seen (like if you want to play a stable release, or play in your own sandbox development area, etc). It's really great community of folks.

Really nice recommendation, thank you!

I play chess on lichess and go on OGS and I had no idea before opening this thread that they were open source.

Open source software is just better I guess edgeworth-shrug

MineClone2 is addictive. All that Minecraft style fun, but free and open source. It's pretty comprehensive and solid for the most part.

How does it differ from Minetest?

Minetest is the engine and Mineclone2 is a game/mod for it.

Minetest is the engine, MineClone2 is the game. Minetest has a default game (Minetest game), which has no mobs or anything. It's dull without mods. MineClone2 is recreation of Minecraft on Minetest, but with some differences. For example, you can use a burger to lure villagers. It's great fun and worth a try.

Warzone 2100, from the community project website and not Steam. Some douche just took the code and uploaded it to Steam themself and does a poor job maintaining it.

Warzone 2100 was my jam! They hadn't actually got cutscenes working in the Linux port I was using so I was.very confused about the story.

Around the year 2000, I had to make a choice between Battlezone 1 and Warzone 2100. I chose Warzone and have never regretted it.

It's always nice just to run through the campaign every couple of years.

Thrive

tl;dr: a better Spore

From the site:

Thrive is a free, open-source game about the evolution of life.

From the lowly tidepools of your home planet, you will rise to cosmic dominance. At every step, powerful creation tools and deep simulation mechanics will aid your species’ development. Revolutionary Games is the open-source team of dedicated volunteers aiming to make Thrive a reality.

Our team seeks to accomplish two major goals: create engaging, compelling gameplay that respects our players’ intelligence, and remain as accurate as possible in our depiction of known scientific theory without compromising the former.

As a past spore player i really wished something like this existed earlier.

If you like that kind of stuff, check out The Sapling, which is being developed and devlogged by this cool nerdy dude who I think is dutch.

The game is like an "eco dwarf-fortress" evolution simulator, and it's been amazing to follow the development of.

Seem's awesome, sadly not open source but it has an appeal.

One Hour One Life is open source, it is a 2D hand drawn survival game where you have 1 real life houre to live from a baby to an elder and contribute to the player-made society in your life as best you can.

You have to pay for an account on the official servers, but i recommend you do to support the development.

Not sure if the dev accepts community patches or not, but the game is public domain license.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hour_One_Life

Minetest and several others that I play regularly have already been mentioned, so I wanted to shout out a game I've been following and playing for years, waiting for their 1.0 release: FreeOrion

https://www.freeorion.org/

It's essentially a clone of the Master of Orion series, which are classics in the 4X world.

Naev - an open world space exploration game. Cruise the galaxy as a bounty hunter, work as a freighter, enlist in the military, or become a pirate! Lots of ship customization and a huge map with lots of factions.

My PC always has 3 games installed, and depending on the distro I'm currently on they may have come directly from the default repos:

  • Battle for Wesnoth
  • Warzone 2100
  • OpenRCT2

I have lost count of how hours I have in all 3.

Xonotic, if you like very fast paced shooters.

Teeworlds is a good game. Unfortunately the player base got very small, even though it's on Steam.

I had fun playing Dink Smallwood (I think the Dink Smallwood HD Version on Android). You run around, solve tasks, and work your way through the story.

It is, as you described, not actually great, but great in a sense that you can have much fun with it. I especially liked the humor.

Oh gosh, that's a blast from the past. I forgot that existed.

ScummVM supports many many games. Some people might think it's an emulator, but it's actually a collection of reverse engineered game engines.

eDuke32 and other Build Engine source ports

SuperTuxKart Xonotic Openarena

Xonotic is a fun spin on the Quake formula. Loved dueling with that guided rocket on aerowalk. Just a shame all the fallout that happened with Nexuiz

Open arena is just quake 3 with bad art assets, might as well play quake live to find real players.

What happend to Nexuiz?

It's creator sold the game's rights to a company called IllFonic in 2010 in order to release a proprietary version.

Like the other poster said, it was an open source project but the rights were sold to illfonic. Xonotic is the fork the community made to keep the open source project going

People like giving recommendations like Super Tux Kart that haven’t aged well and don’t play well.

What's the issue with SuperTuxKart? I thought that it was great fun when I played it.

It's just not very good compared to any other kart game. Aside from the fact that it's very dated, the driving is slow, the levels are wide and uninspired, the racing itself is very simple. SRB2Kart is another open source karting game and it's sooooo much better.

For a game currently still maintained, it seriously didn't age well in all departments especially animations, sound design and character models.

Beyond All Reason if you're looking for an RTS similar to Supreme Commander. I haven't tried playing it in a few years though. I'm sure it's gotten some updates since then.

Supreme Commander & SupCom Forged Alliance are super cheap on discount on GOG. Forged Alliance Forever is incredible with the amount of work they've done to patch the game and keep the community going.

Great game, although someone recently told me not all graphics were licensed free licenses.

My favorite: cataclysm dda, flare rpg, oolite.

OpenRCT (not totally free but a damn impressive project nonetheless)

OpenRCT is free iirc! You can just get the RCT2 demo for the assets OpenRCT needs

Which of these are available on Android?

I have F-droid, and Ive installed Mindustry and Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

Mindustry is great for wasting time.

Battle For Wesnoth is on android, the controls are kinda wonky but it's not bad.

Barotrauma is source available (no commercial, public use, restricted for game modding and contributions) Librerama is dumbways to die style minigames

KeeperRL is a lighter Dwarf-Fortress like game where you play as a Monster making a Dungeon.

zero-k is really good rts. Its similiar to supreme commander

ClassicUO is a nice open source client for Ultima Online. Need to have the game assets.

Taisei Project for Touhou and other 2D bullet-hell shooter fans (I recommend installing it instead of playing online).

Amagettron advanced en soldat are fun games (not sure if they're open source)

I really liked Speed Dreams when I played it years ago. Never heard anyone else talk about it. Warsow and Red Eclipse were also good.

When I played open source games around 15 years ago, these were all the same games mentioned. There doesn't seem to be a lot of progress

Veloren is written in Rust and is inspired by Zelda Breath of The Wild. Both of those are relatively recent.