Perhaps the idea of giant Anne Hathaway’s plodding after you through a derelict manor is what really nails your fear button. Or you want to bring about a title of Ghostbusters that actually doesn’t blow chunks.
Whatever your idea of a good time is, Frictional Games classic title Amnesia: The Dark Descent is now offered those that like to poke and tinker in code a massive opportunity, as the title is now officially Open Source.
What that means is that you can do anything you want to the code to fundamentally alter the title under GPL 3, a copyleft contract (General Public License) that allows users to take parts and bring it into new projects with a heft of legal mumbo-jumbo that ultimately offers users of the open-source code freedoms with certain notes.
Frictional Games states in their blog that Amnesia: The Dark Descent has enjoyed a wealth of community support via modding, and now Frictional Games wants the opportunity to offer something back to the community as a means of gratitude for the unwavering support.
With the announcement, Frictional Games has released both Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs onto GitHub as open-source projects. You can download the entirety of both titles, and tinker freely with the engine and title.
Frictional Games makes a statement that the titles are not to be considered as entirely ‘free’, drawing comparisons to ‘free speech’ rather than ‘free beer’.
One could download the entirety of the program and compile it locally so that it runs, but at that level of desire they’re frankly more inclined to pirate the standard game or purchase it on their desired storefront rather than dealing with the swampy maze of IDE’s and libraries.
You can also freely alter anything within the code that you want, changing the titles drastically into a new unholy abomination of spaghetti code and dreams for everyone else to play and experience.
This is a rare gift to hobbyist programmers that are looking for precisely what makes titles tick behind the scenes, and could well serve as a means to kickstart an entirely new and ambitious project from yet unheard of developers.
The long-term benefits and consequences of this action, along with the incessant possibility of bad actors attempting to turn the GPL3 licensing statement away in hopes of not getting caught, is a far cry into the future. Right now for code hobbyists, the important aspect is that you can tinker with the engine of Amnesia and see how game development looks from a unique perspective.
