Ew, not like Fortnite, I mean like indie launchers
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Starsector, perhaps the greatest 2D space game of all time.
This actually looks really good! I’ll have to ask the missus for an advance on my pocket money 😀
I’ve probably played a few hundred hours of SuperTuxKart. It’s a mario kart clone except i like it way better than the mario karts I’ve played.
Mindustry is fun, it’s like a space factory builder thing.
I was going to say the powder toy but it turns out its on steam now
So is Mindustry. And it costs $10 on there for some reason…
Most of the time the steam version acts as the “donation button” for many small indie and f2p open source games. It exists for no other reason then to cost money so you CAN buy the dev a beer if you want. Steam is easier, more likely to get people to actually donate, supports more countries, has less restrictions, has less taxes and fees in many cases even with steams cut.
Like its amazingly hard to actually monitize something globally in a reasonable, fair and efficent way. Fucking half the time you spend more money even attempting to do it then it would cost to just let steam handle it. As much as people bitch, moan, cry and whine about various store fronts taking a huge cut it SERIOUSLY is a fucking life saver and EXTREMELY fucking worth it in almost every case ever with basically zero expections.
Sure it would be nice to have it be smaller. But like FUCK man. Iv tried to do it my self. IT SUCKS. I would gladdly pay someone half the fucking profits to deal with all the bullshit for me if i wasnt trying to sell a product to make a living on in. Even then… i would be damn well fucking tempted.
It’s worth giving the guy ten bucks imo.
Oh what, that’s very weird
I focus on non commercial free games that are also (for the most part) Open Source too.
- Luanti: Website | Flathub | PCGamingWiki | Video | Very close Minecraft like clone (note its old name was Minetest for the longest time). Each downloadable subgame requires extremely low space, in the MBytes range! No account or any online servers are needed (edit: off course its needed to download, but not otherwise). Open Source.
- osu!: Website | Flathub | PCGamingWiki | Video | Rhythm style game where you use the mouse. I think the code is Open Source, but not the assets? I’m not sure.
- Taisei Project: Website | Flathub | PCGamingWiki | Video | Fan project in the Touhou Project series. Old school bullet hell shmup from top down perspective. Open Source.
Note Flathub is a repository for Linux. If you are on Windows, go to their website and look for downloads.
Funny enough, moving to Linux meant I discovered a lot of cool tools and games that I wouldn’t have otherwise…and then eventually learned they had Windows releases anyway, so it wasn’t strictly necessary to ditch MS for them. But beneficial anyway.
One of the reasons why you find so many interesting tools on Linux is, that you are new and need to setup your environment. Maybe even searching for alternatives. That will make you discover lot of stuff by nature.
Regarding osu’s source code, I think the original osu (osu!stable) is closed-source, and I think the servers might be closed-source, but I believe osu!lazer, the new reimplementation in C#, is fully opensource. It’s an ongoing effort and a long-term migration it’s in the middle of, but lazer looks great and I think it’s already meant to be the main version now.
Stable is also dead, thats part of the reason its closed source and staying that way. He doesn’t want people using it and it will be retired entirely at some point. Its basically a unsaveable pile of pasta.
An MMO with no micro transactions: Clan Lord
It’s been around since the 90s, the original developer is now a farmer and gave control of the world to the players rather than selling to a larger company.
We could use an influx of newbies, just don’t be a turd.
Starsector is one of my favorites from the last decade.
Battle for Wesnoth, very good high fantasy strategy game. Lots of player created campaigns, and tons of mods
Edit: looking at their website, it is available through steam, but it is also available in a variety of other places.
Yeah, it’s available on Steam (for free) but I think it still fits this thread nicely.
It’s impressive that they’re still actively developing it after 20 years. For anyone else like me who used to play Wesnoth a lot but hasn’t touched it in a couple of years, I just noticed that they have added a new mainline campaign fairly recently.
I love that it continues to be worked on too. I remember playing it well over a decade ago.
Love this game! It still holds up pretty well
Vintage Story, Voices of the Void
2nded for voices of the void
- 0 A.D.
- Beyond All Reason
- Open BOR (beats of rage)
- M.U.G.E.N
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a really good traditional roguelike, often considered one of the four pillars of the genre along with NetHack, ADOM, and TOME. (Those are on Steam, however; Crawl is not.)
Voices of the Void
Absolute peak game that doesn’t really have any contemporaries.
A game with base management, fully open map, random events ranging from spooky to hilarious, minigames to fix equipment, little robot helpers, big robot helpers that require some assembly, but don’t need charging thanks to running on nuclear power, and a quadbike you can backflip.
And the Christmas gun.
Racing simulator that launched in the early 2000s and is still going. There have been some rough times but overall the feeling of admiration is hard to deny for the 3 (mostly 2 now) devs. A couple years ago they updated it to create and allow mods and this year they released a public test for new graphical updates. I don’t even play often anymore but I still check for updates almost daily :)
I’m surprised no one mentioned it yet, but Kitten Space Agency
It’s a free spiritual successor to Kerbal Space Program that tries to be everything that KSP2 wasn’t. It’s still in early development by its progressing fast and it already looks great and allows you to do a lot of cool things, and it’s also built using their own engine instead of Unity and has modding support.
And it’s not on steam.
Beyond All Reason (BAR) A spiritual successor to supreme commander made by a team of fans. It’s free and had LAN and online multiplayer. Really fun if you enjoyed the source material.
Sauerbraten is always worth a mention for me. It’s a quake style open source shooter with built-in mapping tools. Definitely a little dated but the game still feels more responsive and fun than a lot of other games today. I think I would really enjoy tinkering with it if I was still a teenager.
SRB2K, or Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart, is a mod of SRB2, itself a doom mod, that is an absolute love letter to the classic days of Mario Kart (I’m thinking super mario kart or 64). Full of small QoL changes, and with a forum full of mods for any character you can think of, it’s an easy pitch if you’ve ever wanted to play a kart styled game thats better than the original, with online play
Worth noting the devs have since released a sequel, Robotniks Ring Racers, but it does it’s own thing in a way that does less for me personally in terms of nostalgia, and is also generally more complicated, and thus harder to pull random friends into. That’s not to say it’s worse or bad, it’s just got very different appeal
