I decided to write down a list of complete (no alpha/beta), playable (no proprietary dependencies), FOSS videogames.
I added all the games I could find online + all of the games that came to my memory.
Feel free to have a look to see if there’s something you didn’t know. And please suggest anything I missed, but please do not suggest pre-release or unfinished games.
Thank you!
EDIT: thank you very much everyone for the comments and for sharing additional awesome lists of FOSS material. Hopefully one day I will have the time to sift through all these games and pick all the non-pre-release ones which don’t have any proprietary dependencies.
In the meantime, here’s a copy of the links:
- LibreGameWiki - A wiki of free games and related topics started by Han Dao.
- Open Source Game Clones - Open-source or source-available remakes of great old games in one place.
- Open source games (bobeff) - A list of different open-source video games and commercial video games open-source remakes.
- Open Source Games (trillarion) - A list of open source games, game frameworks and game creation tools.
Maybe it is better to avoid duplication of effort and contribute to OSGL.
You just need to add a “mature” tag to it and a option to filter by it. contributing to it is easy as far as i can tell.
They seem to be a bit more lenient than me. Their list also includes games which depend on non-free assets, as long as the source code is free. Still, I will add this list to the list of lists in the post. Thanks!
How about open arena? http://www.openarena.ws/
Hi! Thanks for the suggestion. I can’t quite understand if this project is mature and if it depends on non-free assets. My first question emerges from the fact that they use a 0.x.x version identifier, and the second one from what is says on this page.
Content repository for OA3 is not yet available.
Thank you for this recommendation, but although the code is GPL-2.0, some of the assets for BAR are proprietary.
I didn’t know that, but I also noticed after posting that on the download page they describe it as “alpha+” so that would also disqualify it from your list.
Hypnagonia. A FOSS Slay The Spire-like game. I made this one _
Hi! So nice to see you here!
I hope you don’t mind, I would prefer to only keep finished games on this list. There already are lots of awesome curated lists which include pre-release FOSS games.
Is any FOSS game really every “finished”?
In any case, Hypnagonia is “finished” in the sense that you can play a run end-to-end. It just could use more content, but being excluded for such lists doesn’t help find collaborators.
Fair enough, in that case let’s add it. But if you don’t mind me sharing my opinion: you say everywhere that it’s a pre-release software, and the 0.x.x version supports this hypothesis. If you think it’s ready to be considered a completed project (but not necessarily also finished) you might want to be more explicit about it.
While I understand where you’re coming from, I think this list exists for a different purpose than to find you collaborators. While I didn’t make the list, I do like having a list of competed FOSS games somewhere, as I think it fills a gap in FOSS game reporting. I think there should be (and know there are) other lists specifically for FOSS games looking for collaborators.
I’m not specifically looking for collaboration . I just point that collaboration is useful for FOSS, but it requires visibility.
A suggestion - open Tyrian
https://github.com/opentyrian/opentyrian
One of the greatest shmups ever, the creator open sourced it a while ago. Still weirdly addictive too, only DOS era game I still play regularly
Holy shit. I played the shit out of this game when I was a kid. I had no idea someone ported it like this.
There’s even an android port, although it’s pretty hard to do the ship twiddles on touchscreen lol
Hi! Although the engine is free, the game assets seem to be proprietary. Still thanks for sharing the suggestion.
Thank you very much, I will have a thorough browse and filter the games that match my requisites. If you have any one you like in particular, feel free to share.
I have this list bookmarked. Maybe it can help:
https://github.com/bobeff/open-source-games#business-and-tycoon-gamesThank you a lot, this also seems to be a great list. And it comes with list of lists as well! I will have a deep look and see which games match my criteria.
Glad to be helpful ^ - ^
I’m so glad to hear someone liked Strife enough to do a port of it. I did not do well trying to play that thing as a dumb kid, but I was entranced by the tone and scope of it. Probably had something to do with my ttrpg writing habits.
Strife was great. Soft locking your game because you made the wrong choice or attacked the wrong guy was really special to me. Good memories.
It’s such a great lesson to teach a kid, that you can irrevocably ruin your own life. It’s always an option!
I see kids these days and I feel like some of them don’t know, they’ve got quicksave eyes sometimes.
I have this other bookmarked link that may be helpful:
https://osgameclones.com/Thanks a lot. This seems to be a very complete list, I will have a look and see which ones match my criteria. If you have any one you like in particular, feel free to share.
CC non-commercial is not a free license. FSF lists it under documentation licenses because it doesn’t recommend any CC license for software but the concerns are still valid.
Note that selling copies of free software is explicitly encouraged; free refers to freedom (specifically the “four freedoms”) and not to price. Commercial usage restrictions conflict with freedom zero (although it’s unclear how this applies in the case of a game) and commercial distribution restrictions conflict with freedoms two and three.
Ah, that’s a shame, I never really thought about it, but it does make very much sense. I’ll demote but keep the CC BY-NC games in a separate section in this list for now, but I will probably remove them in the future once the list grows enough. Thanks for the pointer!
Space Station 14. Outrageously fun, deep, rewarding, hilarious, insane game. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The learning curve for basic controls can be a lot, but it’s so worth it.
The third link has it, but not the first.
Here’s my Mastodon thread on one of my favorite SS14 rounds, which I got quite a few videos of: https://packmates.org/@noxypaws/115755081201489367
SS14 is still in early-access, but fair enough, it’s so popular that it deserves at least to be in the honorable mentions. Thanks for your suggestion!
Early access isn’t a good way to describe the state of the game to be honest. “Playtest” is even misleading, but slightly less so. It’s such a unique formula, being open source with tons of contributors and tons of forks, and being unlikely to ever reach a point of being “stable” or “released”. There will never stop being frequent releases. And the current state of the upstream game is very polished, performant, full of content, and that’s not even including the dozens of forks which all have their own unique features or changes, some of which may make it upstream and some which will remain unique to certain forks/servers
I believe the devs of the upstream game/engine/launcher/toolkit are targeting features for administration, moderation, and quality of life for the large influx of players for when they DO eventually hit the “no longer playtest” switch:
https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues/23246
RTS: 0.A.D.
FPS: D-Day:Normandy
Hi, thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately 0 A.D. is still in beta, so it wouldn’t qualify for this list yet. It’s definitely popular enough to deserve to be in the honorable mentions though, so I will add it.
As for D-Day:Normandy I assume you mean this? I can’t seem to find a license (nor source code actually, but maybe there is no source code as all scripts might have been written manually). I could add it if it’s actually FOSS, but I’d need help about the license and where to find sources.
In your link, the source is in the src folder
The license is GPLv2. I believe the file is called GNU.TXT in the repository, at least that’s what I have in mine https://github.com/InFerYes/dday
Additionally there’s LICENSE.TXT with some information by Id Software, who open sourced the engine on which this game is based.
My repository’s code is what runs on the active servers. Powabanga’s has installers for the clients.
Another RTS suggestion, OpenRA: https://www.openra.net/
Hi! Although OpenRA’s source code is free, it depends on proprietary assets, so unfortunately it doesn’t qualify for this list. Still, thanks for the suggestion, CnC and RA were both amazing games!
A FOSS lemmings clone.
Added, thanks for the suggestion! They tricked me with the 0.x.x version identifier, but it seems to be a mature/completed project.
