R.L. Dane - FOSS Games are actually pretty good!
rldane.space

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/6819337

Mon 04 December 2023 by R.L. Dane

There’s a lot of talk about gaming in Linux these days, and that’s exciting, because it’s drawing attention to Linux’s capabilities. While the games being spoken of are mostly proprietary (and pretty awful, from a software-freedom perspective), it’s good to see people getting interested in Linux, even when for only pragmatic reasons.

But beyond the attention-grabbing AAA titles, there are many FOSS games worth checking out.

Admittedly, I am not much of a gamer, and never have been. I’m hoping to draw attention to the possibilities of FOSS gaming, but what will follow is hardly exhaustive. But I have tried to gather the names a few FOSS games on Android I’ve enjoyed burning time with, and a few desktop games I’ve heard of or played with occasionally that are worthy of more attention from the gaming community:

https://rldane.space/foss-games-are-actually-pretty-good.html

  • flora_explora@beehaw.org
    15·
    1 year ago

    Good on android are also unciv, feudal tactics, beat feat and flowit!

    Not Foss, but free without ads or trackers FOSS and my all-time favorite is “Simon Tatham’s Puzzles”. This is so addicting I go through a cycle of playing it obsessively until I have to delete it and wait a few months until installing it again xD

    ETA: thanks for providing the sources. Couldn’t find it on fdroid because of the different name :)

  • zabi94@lemmy.ml
    11·
    1 year ago

    Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a great game. I lost hundreds of hours trying to beat it, and the achievements are a great way to track progress

  • barrett9h@lemmy.one
    11·
    1 year ago

    missed a lot of good games, like:

    Freeciv

    Battle for Wesnoth

    all id Doom and Quake games up to Doom 3

  • baconicsynergy@beehaw.org
    10·
    1 year ago

    Endless Sky is amazing and under continuous, active development.

    You can build your fleet as large as you want too, which can get insane. There’s no cap hard coded in the source - one player I talked to built his fleet with thousands of freighters until his computer started lagging.

    Veloren is amazing too. I love collecting lanterns, and taming animals and mounts is great gameplay.

  • ADHDefy@kbin.social
    9·
    1 year ago

    These are all great games. I’m surprised not to see some of the heaviest hitters, like 0 A.D., Beyond All Reason, Xonotic, or Veloren.

  • quantenzitrone@feddit.de
    8·
    1 year ago

    yes and no

    FOSS games are good and fun, but to deliver a AAA game with a near-realistic 3D Graphics and a good several hour-lasting story, you kinda need some funding. I would be all for a concept where a game is open source, but you need to pay for the textures, meshes, voiceovers, in game dialog strings and similar stuff that is not code.

  • zolax
    6·
    1 year ago

    Falling Lightblocks is a brilliant open-source Tetris clone for Android, with different gamemodes, multiplayer, leaderboards and a “campaign” mode. definitely worth your time

    • ericjmoreyOP
      4·
      1 year ago

      Clever avoidance of potential trademark dispute with the name.

  • Kühe sind toll@feddit.de
    5·
    1 year ago

    As a student I’m very glad that super tux cart exists. This helped me so much to get through free lessons. It takes a bit of time to get a feeling for the controls, but once you figured it out its great.

    Another game worth mentioning is Unciv. A beautiful 2D turn based strategy civilisation development strategy game.

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    1. I don’t see how anyone could play a game like Minetest on their phone. I have tried before and struggle like hell when compared to playing on desktop.

    2. It’s definitely not a maintained or worked on game anymore, but I really like Me And My Shadow (MAMS). It’s just a 2D platformer, but the twist is that you get to record movements for a shadow version of yourself to follow to try and help either you or it reach the end of the level. I don’t recall if there’s anything other than the windows version.

    3. I also would like to throw in HyperRouge (which took me forever to find because I couldn’t remember the name). Something, something, traverse top down isometric hexagon world fighting enemies, collecting things, unlocking new areas, something, something. It’s been a few months since I last played, so my memory is a little fuzzy.

    • alkheemist@aussie.zone
      4·
      1 year ago

      Hyperrogue is not quite a top down hexagon world, it’s a top down heptagon world. The premise is that it is a roguelike set in a hyperbolic world, and different regions teach you different weird properties of a hyperbolic space. For example, the crossroads feature an infinite amount of parallel lines and yet there are still forks in the pathway.

      Even though it’s foss, it is also for sale on steam if you want to support the dev