Mastodawn

Might as well share this game that I have been working on for a while. For the past two years I have been working on Spaceships, a completely free/libre 2D space-themed shooter game. The core idea of this game is that you are a spaceship and your goal is to destroy other spaceships by shooting them with bullets that you fire.

Spaceships has two main game modes, singleplayer and multiplayer. Singleplayer consists of five levels as part of a story mode where you need to destroy all bot players without losing all your lives. Multiplayer is similar but more open-ended with a wide variety of game modes, including survival and capture-the-flag.

The website for this game is at https://spaceships.me and the repository is hosted on Codeberg.

#spaceships #gamedev #freesoftware #foss

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M. McC

@rustydev
Checked it out today.

Gloriously political intro. No vague fictional bad guys.

The movement, UI & graphics are impressively polished.
It'd be sweet to have more successful FOSS games that don't look to be from the 2000s.

As you're saying, it just needs more depth & variety to the gameplay.
Maybe a funky soundtrack aswell.
I'm keen to see what 1.6.0 brings.

Along the road are you considering uploading it to Steam for more traction, or isn't that in the FOSS spirit?

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rustydev 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸🇺🇦6d ago

@niknabno Thanks for the feedback :)

Love hearing it when people enjoy the projects I make, especially recognition of where things are polished. Though maybe only the outcome is polished, the actual code that achieves the graphics is a bit of a mess. This is because extra work is required to make a multiplayer game smooth compared to a singleplayer game. I am currently working on refactoring this code before I start improving the gameplay for the 1.6.0 release.

I don't have any plans on putting this game on Steam, though I'm not 100% against it. My intention of this project is to prioritise FOSS values over project growth, which is why I'm having the source code on Codeberg rather than GitHub where the latter would get more visibility. But an ethical argument could be made for adding it to Steam in that the positives of spreading FOSS games to more people would outweigh the disadvantage to supporting a proprietary platform.

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rustydev 🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸🇺🇦6d ago

@niknabno I am expecting the 1.6.0 release to be completed between September to November. It's hard to guess exactly when as it depends how much I want to improve the gameplay and how much university work will get in the way.

A soundtrack would be a nice feature, but I'm not planning to get that done by 1.6.0, as I'm pretty bad at making music. I could use someone else's existing soundtrack published under a free license, but I prefer trying my best to create all the art myself as I get more of a sense that the game is my own creation (though I don't follow this perfectly since I use an existing GUI library and fonts).