What is Reddit's opinion of Frogatto & Friends?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Well, the problem with open source gaming is that there are much more coders than designers, so most games have good code (engine etc) but lack levels/characters/story.

For that reason, many open-source games seem to be clones of really simple games (like pong) or simply engines that run datafiles from the original (doom).

The two games that stand out IMHO:

Frogatto

Wesnoth

EDIT:

Just read the games wikipedia pages, and it turns out those two share some of their lead staff.

Seems an AMA request for David White is in order.

Games? Yes.

Open source games with non-free content? Hell Yes.

Tool applications? If I need to.

Tool applications with viable FLOSS equivalents? No.

> Big budget games will never be OSS.

Depends on your definition. According Richard Stallman, making non-code assets free is "nice ... but not ethically imperative." I can easily imagine a future of open source games if we take the Frogatto model to be open source. From an economic standpoint, it's probably inevitable—game makers get the free cake of a GPL engine while still having something to sell.

Battle for Wesnoth. Seriously, this game is the shit. Features multiplayer campaings as well as really cool (but quite difficult sometimes) single player campaigns. Quality 2D graphics. Seriously, it's better quality than some of those games you have to pay for.

Also, SCUMMVM, and two games that are now free - Beneath a Steel Sky and Flight of the Amazon Queen. Seriously, those are two amazing adventure games.

Frogatto, old school 2D platformer. Really high quality game, nice sounds, awesome graphics, and whole thing is just so good that you will cry because of nostalgia for old Amiga games.

Oh wow. I wasn't expecting much when I clicked on the article, but this is great:

> Their latest Linux developer they have hired that I originally referred to Valve Software for hiring is David White. David White was the original creator of the open-source Battle for Wesnoth game. He's now going to work for Valve on their Linux efforts.

White, aka Sirp, is the developer behind Wesnoth and Frogatto. These are two of my favorite open source games. I think everyone should at least try them out for a few minutes. Even if you are not a gamer, or not interested in these particular games, they are GPL code and quality contribution to our community. It's worth knowing about them if just so you can recommend good open source games to friends.

Anyways, I don't much care for Phoronix as a source or Larabel's reporting, but if Valve has hired White then I am quite excited by the news.

I download indie games. Check out Frogatto & Friends.

All the music was written by a good friend of mine. It's a great game, 2-D sidescrolling platformer/rpg type game. Extremely fun and entertaining!

Edit: Fixed link.

In Frogatto our levels are made up of two types of things:

• "Tiles" containing most static parts of the level. We have tilesheets (example ). We allow you to easily draw tiles -- e.g. you can trace a rectangle you want filled with rock tiles in the editor -- and then have rules specified of which tiles from the tilesheet to place where.

• "Objects" -- The player, enemies, and also some static props are objects. These are represented by a sprite of any size. If you wanted to place e.g. a house you would do it as an object, not as tiles.

Here is a video which gives a very brief idea of how things work.

Of course there are a variety of trade-offs depending what you want in your game.

Our engine is open source and especially suited to 2D platformers if you wanted to consider using something with this kind of thing already built into it.

This question was asked before, with a more C++ focus, here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/wvhrh/open_source_games/

To surmise it, after realising that Lugaru was probably the worst example of source code to learn from, Frogatto was suggested.

There are a couple I'm familiar with.

/r/tipofmytongue is a subreddit for basically anything you can't quite put your finger on, while /r/yester is a subreddit for finding recent reddit content.

Your question is probably just as valid here, but those are just a little bit more specific.

As for your question, are you thinking of Frogatto? It's a game that you can edit the source code to change things on the fly. I believe Overgrowth also has the same capabilities.

Some projects ask/rely on donations to help offset costs (usually for games like MMORPGs that need dedicated servers). Others actually do cost money to play while still being open source, but I feel like that number is small. One example that I'm familiar with is Forgatto and Friends, which is a platformer formed largely from a team of people who worked on the Battle for Wesnoth in the past and started up this new project.

I haven't played Frogatto in a while, but last I recall it was free to build and run/play on Linux, while costing a modest amount in order to run it on Windows, iOS, or other mobile platforms. While they make the code available under an open source license, their media assets (art, music, and so on) are under a proprietary license and can not be shared or otherwise used outside of Frogatto. It's a pretty awesome game and AFAIK is moderately successful, so I'd recommend giving it a look and researching its history.

There's Frogatto, a 2D platformer with a traditional single player storyline. It's in the Debian/Ubuntu repos, so you should be able to just do:

sudo apt-get install frogatto

>will there be a campaign for them?

It's hard to say. As far as I know, there hasn't been a campaign specifically developed to ship with the game since the original Heir to the Throne campaign a decade ago.

What happens is we take high quality user made campaigns (available on the add-on server) that stay true to the original Wesnoth gameplay style and bring them into the fold. They get cleaned up (plot holes, bugs, canonical inconsistencies, tomato surprises, awkward dialog, translations). They get prioritized for new art. And they get shipped with future versions of the game.

So it entirely depends on the fans. I mean the entire "Khalifate" faction started as a fan project. Its creator paid so much attention to balancing it against the default factions that the decision was made to polish it up and make it official.

I imagine there will be a campaign for them eventually. They're based in Persian culture and mythology. It's a great change of style that someone out there will want to tell a compelling story with.

Where did they come from? How did they arrive on this continent? How will they interact with the kingdom of Wesnoth? Or maybe the entire campaign takes place away from Wesnoth. I'm sure they have their own problems at home. There's a lot of opportunity and room to maneuver with them.

>Dear god I had forgotten how much I absolutely adore the sprite work in this game.

You would probably also enjoy Frogatto and Friends then. Richard Kettering is the art director on both games. He's the primary artist for Frogatto. His high standards and his experience really show. You see all these other games these days adopting crappy pixel art because they think it's easy and "retro", but this guy loves and understands the medium. Like holy shit.

*since the parent comment got deleted, i'll give the gist of what was said: That Frogatto is weird since its code is open source, but not its assets. and there was a link to the frogatto source page: http://www.frogatto.com/source

How is that weird? Isn't that how id software does it as well (and to some extent, firefox)?

Seems perfectly reasonable to me and I think if people thought of this as the norm we'd see more games with protagonist that aren't penguins.

Absolutely, all you need to do is provide the graphics / sounds, and write the scripts for new objects. Adding new tiles is even easier, the process being mostly automated by a script.

The wiki is not up to date with all latest changes, so if reading other objects' code doesn't give you all the answers you need, don't hesitate to come ask on the forums, or on the IRC channel. We'd really like to see other people make games with this engine, and we'll be happy to help.

Are you playing the right games? If you're 33, you probably remember 16-bit and possibly even 8-bit era games. In which case, sure, the modern big-budget games are very pretty but are often very samey and ridiculously easy compared to the games of our youth. Oh look, another linear FPS, only this time every facial hair on $rugged_space_marine is individually animated. Yawn.

Remember the wii may be weak in raw hardware power, but actually has casual, cheerful, fun games. I'm not saying there aren't any good games out there on the PC or x-box, obviously there are, but make sure to try some downloadable indie games or fire up an emulator for some retro games, not just the latest heavily advertised unskippablecutscenefest.

What am I playing today, on my dual-quad-core PC? Frogatto & Friends. It's a 2D platformer that looks like it was looking for an Amiga 1200 and was accidentally frozen only to wake in 2011.

For what it's worth, I've assembled remote, not-money-driven development teams, and while lack of motivation / people fizzling out can be a huge problem, several games have been created (e.g. http://www.wesnoth.org and http://www.frogatto.com ).

If there is interest I could perhaps write an article about what it takes to create a remote dev team to build a game.

Reminds me of Knytt Stories, Frogatto and Spelunky, of course in a very positive way. I kind of wish the dungeons were more beautiful (like the beautiful outside, just.. damn) though, I take they're just placeholders, right?

I take it that the whole world is random/procedural? Are you planning to stick with these doors, or are you going to make something more out of it?