[Medium Work] [Intermediate] Open Source Sandbox Game(Like Starbound or Terraria)

[Caloxeno]

Project description

The idea is to create an Open Source sandbox game like Starbound or Terraria. These are 2D scrolling games where you can do many things. If you want an idea of what I am talking about, you can check the Starbound´s official webpage: http://playstarbound.com/

Please note that the visual style of these game is always pixelated.

Relevant Technology

This game could be created using a game engine; However, I think that the best way would be to do it with code. For example, Starbound was created using the Lua code language.

About the game, it would be great if it could be available for Windows, Mac and Linux. But it´s ok if it can only be for Windows

Who is this for

I do not know too much about it, but I think that this is not a hard thing to do for someone who knows how to do this.

Also, whoever makes this, should be able to do art assets for the game.

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Share on Twitter/other social media if you will. Something like

New project on Open Source Ideas Initiative: [short description] – [link]

[mayuso]

What about using LibGDX?

It has a really big disadvantage:

• AFAIK, you need java installed to be able to play a game created using LibGDX.

BUT, it has many advantages:

• LibGDX is an open source API with a huge community (Some of them probably willing to help with a LibGDX open source game).
• It runs on Java, which means it's 100% multiplatform (It even supports HTML, Android and iOS, if you are interested and design your game accordingly).

[FredrikAugust]

Maybe it's just me not knowing that much about game dev, but I'd argue that this is advanced, and a lot of work. Creating a full side-scrolling RPG like terraria (e.g.) is going to take some time..

[ghost]

I like this project....

[tomdwaggy]

@FredrikAugust while I do not know that much about game dev, I do know about software development as a whole and this is a very in-depth project. Building something like Starbound's engine itself would be a difficult. Actually crafting it in to an awesome game would be monumental.

An additional consideration: many people won't even play Minecraft, Terraria, Starbound, etc. tons of mods... and they tend to increase the longevity of a game. Harnessing that development model is very tricky, and much of it is up to random chance.

[FredrikAugust]

@TomDataworks Thanks for the insight; those were my initial thoughts as well. Furthermore, and this is only from my limited experience with developing large applications through open-source groups such as this one; I don't think this will work without some proper managing. Having random people join in and contribute without any form of structure will just lead to a code base filled with programmers nightmares; undocumented features, coding styles, etc. etc.

[DomtronVox]

Just ran into this and thought I would throw in my two cents. Sorry if this is necro-ing a bit too much. The FOSS community already has a game that is similar though not exactly what you described. OpenClonk. www.openclonk.org

Clonk is a multiplayer-action-tactics-skill game. It is often referred to as a mixture of The Settlers and Worms. In a simple 2D antfarm-style landscape, the player controls his crew of Clonks, small but robust humanoid beings. The game encourages free play but the normal goal is to either exploit valuable resources from the earth by building a mine or fight each other on an arena-like map.

Basically it has destroy-able terrain, which is pixel based as opposed to grid based, and construction, which is mostly entity based but you can do some pixel changes with dirt. It focuses in two areas: arena style fighting and settlement building. However it does not have RPG elements or open world like Starbound and Terraria, but it does have randomly generated maps and I believe you can make them fairly large. It also has modding. Probably best to go to the site and check out the video or download it and try it out since it is FOSS.

But I hear you. I found this while looking for sandbox games and there seem to be a dearth of them in the FOSS community. :/

[MatthewScholefield]

Just going to mention that I started on something like this a long time ago called port-craft which was supposed to be a re-implementation of the same game for the Nintendo DS.

It uses SFML and C++ for the implementation.