So I've been making an game for a while now and am looking for a new round of playtesters! In a nutshell, it's an exploration/crafting game with twin-stick shooter controls set inside of an asteroid. So lots of space bugs of shoot, harvest, upgrade, repeat. The game is still missing a lot of content, but the first hour or so is pretty playable now. I keep rewriting the story bits, and most of that is currently ripped out so it might be a bit dry at the moment...

Anyway, I'm currently looking for feedback on the game's intro and early flow:

1. Did the tutorial make sense?
2. Is the pacing in the initial "dirt" biome ok? (Though there isn't a lot of unique items to craft right now...)
3. Feedback on the controls: I've iterated on the "grabbing" mechanic multiple times. I really like gimmicky 1:1 physical controls like that, but some people hate them. I've tried to balance that out with a quick-grab key.
4. Any crashes or other issues?

It's built against the Steam Scout SDK, and should run on pretty much any distro with a new enough SDL I think? Windows binary too for those currently on their work machines or somesuch. ;) There is a workinig Mac version too, but I haven't figure out how to automate that so it tends to get built rarely. There's also a Raspberry Pi 4 version in the download! Though you'll need to compile a newer version of Mesa than they currently have in apt. Otherwise it will run, but not at 60 fps. D: Sounds like Mesa might be updated in the next OS update though?

More links! | Itch.io | Steam | Code | Discord | Blog

So I've been working on a crafting/exploration game for a while called Veridian Expanse. (I guess the details don't really matter, so I won't go into that, but check the links at the end if you're interested) I have some unresolved feelings about making the game open source, and how/why to do it.

1. The last game we released on Steam was up on pirate sites within hours, and showed up fairly high (second page maybe?) of a simple search result of the game's name. It sold "well enough", and since it was a pretty small game so we suspect that there probably wasn't any "rampant piracy". Certainly not enough to bother to reduce it anyway. We didn't even bother to implement the (trivial to break) Steam DRM.

2. From a sales point of view, I don't think the source code is valuable. Nobody wants to pirate the source for some random game, they want the binary that's already been made for them. Also, I've written some blog articles about how some of the game's threading, hot-loading, rendering, and soft shadowing works. At some point when people started asking questions, I would just send them the code because "why not?" Eventually I just mirrored it on Github without the assets.

3. The assets... While I have rights to all the data and graphical assets, the sounds and music are all royalty free items that I've purchased. Even if I wanted to release them, I can't. I'm not sure I want to either.

4. I use Linux to develop the game, but I know most of my sales will come from Windows or console versions. In a way I don't care about the Linux market financially and have been considering just publishing it on Flathub because "why not?" It also runs pretty well on the Pi 4, and I even automated the build for it because "why not?" I certainly don't hate the idea that people might like the game and tell their friends to buy it on other platforms. :p

My current thought is that I should just OSS the code, but leave the assets as proprietary. If someone really wants to pirate the game, there will be some easy way to do that a few search terms away. Even if I give away a Flathub or RPi version it's not going to change the difficulty for someone that wants a Windows version for free. On ther other hand, maybe someone will find something useful in the code or get it running on *BSD or Haiku or something. (It already compiles/runs fine on them, but I don't really want to spend time maintaining those builds)

There's certainly plenty of games with open sourced engines (like the Id games), but closed data. Then there's a few like Mindustry or 0AD that seem to be trying both, but are there other example of games that people can think of for comparison?

Some further Veridian Expanse links if you want to figure out what the heck I'm even talking about:

• https://howlingmoonsoftware.itch.io/veridian-expanse
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/2137670/Veridian_Expanse/
• https://github.com/slembcke/veridian-expanse