$1 million on the HIB! Open Source Aquaria FTW!

[Avatharian]

So who else is as excited as I am?

[dugan]

That is the greatest news ever! THANK YOU Alec, Ryan Gordon, Indie Bundle buyers, and everyone else who made this possible.

[Alec]

When Aquaria goes open source, someone else can finally fix all those stupid little bugs.

But seriously, Today feels like a good day. 

[NeatNit]

2DBoy are party poopers

[Alec]

2DBoy are party poopers

yeah, srsly.

[Alphasoldier]

When Aquaria goes open source, someone else can finally make a sequel to this game.

Fix'd that for you Alec.

Also why is it going open source anyway?

[Guy]

This sounds kinda cool . And really amazing. Aquaria is by far the most outstanding product in the bundle and it seems highly unusual for such a game to go open source.

What will it ultimately mean though? Would random people like us be able to change the code, fix a bug etc, and then release a new version publicly?

[JEV3]

When Aquaria goes open source, someone else can finally fix all those stupid little bugs.

But seriously, Today feels like a good day. 

I also expect to see a ton of fan-made interpretations of the sequel. Hopefully this will open up the modding community, I didn't see near as many Aquaria mods as I expected to. Perhaps if it is open-source, some of the more bold modders (by which I mean programmers) will breathe a little life into it.

[Alec]

It would allow for the mod structure to be improved, certainly... maybe better editor controls etc. Depending on whether there's someone interested in working on that, of course.

But I think the biggest reason to open source stuff is to help other people learn. (in this case, maybe what -not- to do, lol)

[Alphasoldier]

JEV3, I really hope such a thing will happen, there are so many people who bought those games, I will bet at least half will most likely finish Aquaria, perhaps it'll give this community an opportunity to grow again and live.

As I said in an before in another thread, Aquaria has such an endless amount of potential, yet the community wasn't big enough and Aquaria not known enough to actually make something out of it.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for this.

[Hoodlum]

When Aquaria goes open source, someone else can finally fix all those stupid little bugs.

But seriously, Today feels like a good day. 

I have to say I'm  surprised. I remember when a Mac port had only just begun and talk of a Linux port made it seem tenuous at best and now Aquaria is being open sourced. May I ask what it was that motivated such a decision? You really don't see games of Aquaria's quality being open sourced at all, generally. I get that you've probably got most of the revenue you would have already but still, this is unprecedented.

It's interesting, with the ongoing situations at major publishers right now. Ubisoft's DRM requiring constant connection to the net, Activison Blizzards CEO "issues" etc etc. All the while we seem to be experiencing more and more of a groundswell of indie developers. In the last year or two I've bought (far) more indie games than big titles. If you'd have told me that 5 years ago I never would have believed you. This coupled with more mediums with fairer pricing for indies (steam, phone app stores (except the iphone since the licence change)) and the (apparently) huge popular support making even "donate whatever you want" schemes viable seems to echo a new era in gaming.

If you went back 5 or 10 years and tried this, i'm not sure it would work, I'm not sure the culture would be there. At the very least you would be laughed at by the very industry you are now a very successful part of. Is this the beginning of change on the scale of the record industry? I'm starting to think it is. Massive budget games and film seem to be becoming more and more obsolete. Of course there are always exceptions (MW2, Avatar respectively) but those are fewer and further between than ever before - Well, at least the ones that make money.

[Qwertyuiopas]

Open source might not nessecarily mean an end to sales. Lugaru already has released it's source, but their blog post seems to imply that they did not include the data files for the whole game, leaving only the equivalent of the demo, so I doubt that they lost all hope of ever selling another copy of the game because of it.

(Slightly unrelated, but I would not even know this game existed except that it was a part of the bundle. Now I think that it's value was more than the other games combined)

[Alec]

Yeah, open sourcing means you get access to the source, you can do various things with it (depending on the license in question) but it's not like getting a free copy of the game.

The source is just the code, not game content.

It's like how Quake 2 is open source, and gets ported to every device in the universe, but you still need your own copy of the Quake 2 content to play it on whatever device.

[RoadCrewWorker]

I've spent the last few days playing around with randomized (or roughly parameterized) procedural level generation/detailing/population (rather simple thanks to Aquaria's xml level format), so this is really interesting - wonder if i can integrate or automate some of it to be automated in game/editor instead of just separately pregenerated xml code. I assume the codebase is c++? (maybe even a VS project?) Considering how easily editable 99% of the games formats and content are (lua logic,png textures,ogg audio,xml levels) there aren't that many things that actually require changing the engine for.

All the testing time prompts a lot of my steam friends to ask me why i have 45+ hours logged in Aquaria. 

_{Off topic(?) question: My steam version of the game says it's version 1.1.2, while my humble deal installation says its 1.1.1, but i can't seem to find a patch download or changelog. What am i missing?}

[Alec]

Once Aquaria goes open source, the windows version can catch up to 1.1.3.

(1.1.3 is the new Linux and Mac ports, which use a different sound library and have a couple other tweaks)