Lugaru Goes Open-Source | Hacker News Reader

Lugaru Goes Open-Source

blog.wolfire.com

62 pointskevinh8 comments

The Humble Indie Bundle sale is over, and it raised over $1,000,000. As a result, Wolfire games has released the source code to Lugaru.

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It's unclear what licenses will actually be used. It looks like the code is GPL, and the "assets" are under some noncommercial license. But the "game data" (beyond demo levels) is not going to be distributed. I think "game data" means level design, whereas "assets" are models and textures? So you won't get to play the game, you will have to make your own levels.

From this page here: http://www.wolfire.com/humble

Almost all games from the Humble Indie Bundle (except World of Goo) have decided to go opensource.

IMHO the humble indie bundle method is a nice way to launch indie games. Would be nice if they revamp the bundle every couple on months, so that other indie developers can participate and make their buck and a little of popularity before going opensource (if they choose to).

The game assets are included in the snapshot, and can be redistributed for free, but cannot be resold without our permission.

I am awaiting the final license for the assets. To be honest I expected the whole game to be free and open-source so one can freely reuse it. This is a (small) letdown.

I'm not surprised. It's the route that all games seem to take when they go open source - Quake 1-3, Duke Nukem 3D, and Freespace 2 have all taken this route. It's a way to prevent your game from becoming outdated without losing any ability to make money in the future.

You can buy Lugaru for a song right now anyways off the deal website (which has been extended another week).

Edit: I think I misunderstood your comment. It appears that the code will be licensed under the GPL (a link on the bundle website indicates as much). I'd imagine you can reuse the code (with the stipulations attached), but not the art assets, which are almost never distributed with source code releases.

While the engine itself is decent, it's not like you'd want to use the existing assets anyway if you were building a game of it. I still don't understand why they went with rabbits instead of people in uniform (samurai, pikemen, ninjas, ...). It just doesn't feel right.

Besides given their past actions, if you really want to use the assets for a commercial project I'm sure they'd have a reasonable license for it.

I thought the idea of rabbits excellent. It's something new, especially because of the darker mood the game has, and give some passable excuses for the jumps and throws not break the suspension of disbelief.

I think it fitted quite right.

Usagi Yojimbo is a rabbit samurai, and the plot is really nice (http://www.usagiyojimbo.com/). Rabbits as humanized characters aren't something original on Lugaru, but yeah, it definitely fitted right.

Lugaru seemed nice to me (actually I ended up donating some bucks and getting the 5 games, even though they went open), just didn't have time to play them extensively, except for world of Goo, which is addicting (but that goes for another thread). :)

As far as I understand, the game engines went open. Lugaru's characters, levels, textures, models and story will probably be kept commercial.

I don't think you could play the real Lugaru game without paying or pirating it.

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