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Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

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Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're talking about roguelikes, Brogue[0] is awesome as well. [0]: https://github.com/tmewett/BrogueCE

Brogue is great, but I personally found it extremely hard. I have to admit I'm not a huge gamer, but I did sink a couple dozen hours to Brogue with what felt like no improvement at all. You see a Jelly in the second floor? You die. You see a Goblin? You die.

Brogue is a spiritual successor to the original Rogue, where the goal is not to Kill Anything That Moves but rather to get the Amulet and escape by any means necessary.

You don't get "experience points" for killing anything, and there's no "leveling up" (though drinking potions of life increases your max HP). You can see your HP (and your nutrition) as liabilities but they're also resources -- if you go several dungeon levels without losing any HP, maybe you're being too picky about your fights. If you end up popping a bunch of life potions in the first few levels, maybe you're not being picky enough.

Stealth is a totally valid tactic (press ']' to turn on a view of the stealth radius, notice that spending a turn waiting reduces your stealth radius to 1/2 normal, and also I like to press '\' to turn off the dynamic light effects to make it easier to see my stealth radius). You can get through the game in leather armor (especially if its a special one that lets you reflect incoming spells or that lets you blithely breathe otherwise-harmful atmospheric effects).

"Mobility" builds that let you be super choosy about your engagements are also workable (lots of obstruction, blinking, and tunneling).

Tank builds where you've got enchanted plate and broadsword and you're smashing everything also work, but really only to a point. You won't win going head-to-head with dragons.

"Mage" builds with a couple enchanted damage staves and a ring of wisdom are fun, but I scarcely ever find the items I need to make it work.

Oddly enough, the majority of my deaths are to eels :\

I love love love Brogue. Read the code too, the author is great about doing things like building gradient descent maps for the dungeon level and only invalidating them when the dungeon configuration changes, that kind of thing.

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#304
post #26

Teeworlds https://teeworlds.com and its mod ddnet https://ddnet.tw I've been playing for a full on decade, the game was your typical third person shooter but around 2015 a mod came out that allowed fast completion of puzzle like maps, then it diverged and it now has two versions. Everyone mostly sticks to its ddnet counterpart. but the quake style, deathmatch/ctf/team is still fun at times. though nobody plays it.

OMG! I used to play this with my kids 100 years ago. Totally forgot about it.

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#306

Xonotic[1] is excellent (Named Nexuiz in the past, but that name was essentially stolen). Hours of Quake like fun with beefed up graphics and a bunch of interesting gameplay twists. One the mobile side there is Shattered Pixel Dungeon[2], also to be found on F-Droid. The polish behind that project is insane for something FOSS and the hours I put into it are something to be embarrassed about. [1] https://xonotic.org/…

Sauerbraten (previously known as Cube) was always a favourite of mine, with the added twist that the game itself was also the level editor, and different players could be in different "modes" in the same map - a group of people CTFing, while others deathmatched, and a couple of others were literally redrawing the map as they played. I see there's even a release of it that's not that old - I remember it from about 15…

Wouter, one of the original Cube developers / creator of the Cube engine, has started a new game studio. He also made a new programming language that was introduced here, called Lobster. He has a really interesting Twitter feed.

https://www.strlen.com/lobster/

https://twitter.com/wvo

2021 interview at sauerworld: https://www.sauerworld.org/celebrating-20-years-of-cube-an-i...

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#307

Haven't seen these two so thought I'd add them to the list. Minetest is a block building game engine (like minecraft) built around the idea mods add all content. There are a bunch of games built for it, and last I checked a active modding community. https://www.minetest.net/ The other is AlephOne, a engine to play all the Marathon games (story FPS, pre-halo bungie made games) along with a bunch more community created…

Minetest is awesome. It is a lot of fun to play with kids on LAN. We played countless hours on the base game only and then there are tons of mods.

I played Minetest a lot with my kids too. We still have tons of those old maps from our co-op on various computers.

Now that they are playing other games, I still find that I occasionally log into Minetest servers just to look around at all the amazing builds.

In one of them I found a working MS Paint emulator (a wall with the icons and canvas on it), as well as a very impressive and huge ancient Greek temple.

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#308
post #17

Easily the best: Dungeon Crawl https://crawl.develz.org/ OpenRA https://www.openra.net/ Battle for Wesnoth http://www.wesnoth.org/ FreeCiv http://freeciv.org/ Endless Sky https://endless-sky.github.io/

> Dungeon Crawl

This is a favorite. And just to add, after I got a bit tired of roguelikes I tried out Flare and got hooked on the old version in my distro's repos. It's an isometric 3D action RPG.

Later I found it is still under active development and really fun, with a greatly improved base campaign and community mods available as well.

Be sure to get the AppImage rather than whatever might be in older repos if you're running Linux.

https://flarerpg.org/

Recent presentation by Justin, the lead developer: https://flarerpg.org/2022/02/21/i-love-free-software-day-202...

Blog: https://flarerpg.org/blog/

Forums: https://opengameart.org/forums/flare

Re: Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

#309

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/

Yes! I'm always having a quick game of Inertia, Pattern or Slant while waiting for things to download, compile or just because I felt like it. It's nice having so many tiny little fun games available.

Inertia is really cool IMO. I haven't tried Pattern or Slant, thanks for those recommendations. I usually show up for Cube, Flood, Guess, or Same Game.
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