What is the thing that's being democratized right now, as opposed to when Unreal or Unity became available (or XNA, or BASIC on the C64), and how is open source involved?
Godot, Phaser, etc. have existed for about a decade.
From the article:
“You don’t necessarily need advanced programming and graphics skills to make a polished and professional game anymore,”
Yes you do, if you want to do anything but the most basic asset flip, understanding stuff like pathfinding or computer graphics is not optional.
It might not be easy for someone without coding experience to create. Have a look at https://github.com/NoelFB/Celeste/blob/master/Source/Player/...
Here you go:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2022/jun/30/give-up-github-la...
DirectX is (and as far as I can tell, always has been) free to use by anyone.
Which part of DirectX would you like them to open-source that would improve accessibility?
I get it if you like the way it looks, but it has a purpose and it's so tacky to see. Yuck.
On topic: Planimeter publishes Planimeter Game Engine 2D, so if you're interested in game development with a full engine in Lua, check out our work with flagship features like client-side prediction out-of-the-box, network variables on entities, and a sophisticated UI compositor built-in.[1]
If you want to open source a game you generally need to plan for it from the start and only use assets that you fully own or that have licenses that allow redistribution.
You can open source just the code but this is limited in what it allows others to do in terms of contributing to or remixing the game. Even learning from the code is limited if you don't have access to the assets such that you can run the code and make changes.
They can still distribute their mod and other players of the original game will already have the shared assets.
Any new assets can have their own licensing terms.
I've run into similar situations with open sourcing non game code too. I can open source the code I wrote, but not branded images and trademarked assets that designers made. So we just subbed the assets with placeholders. Everything still worked, it just looked different.
With games, though, that becomes harder when something like a level is both an asset and non trivial to replace, and its design is often more unique than the engine itself. Think something like Portal, which is a joy not necessarily because of the Source engine, but because of the great level design and balance.
Just interesting to think about. I'd love to see more open games.
I think id's open source code has been great for lots of reasons. I just think there is untapped potential in "fully" open source games where all the assets (including the source assets like Blender files and not just the intermediate formats like .fbx) are open source as well as the code as that makes it easier for people to experiment, learn and remix the content.
It's like writing, anyone can write. But not everyone can make enough money to live off it
So you have maximize the roi on your time and investment. I highly highly recommend sticking to a commercial engine like unity, unreal, or even phyres.
