Open source games roundup

Week of June 29 - July 5, 2014

In this week's edition of our open source games news roundup, we sidle up to the Ouya All-Access Plan, bop our heads to some dulcet Mario Paint musical masterpieces, and more.

All-you-can-play Ouya for $59.99

Ouya, the micro gaming console that raised $8.6 million during its infamous Kickstarter two years ago, is testing an all-access plan to see if it can get more players on its platform. It seems the company is responding to increased competition, including Google's own Android TV initiative. The Ouya console, which still retails for $99, is now being forced to compete with similarly-priced streaming boxes like Apple TV and Amazon's new Fire TV. Unlike its competition, Ouya developers encourage rooting the little box's operating system and modding its hardware. And now they're giving away 800 games for the price of one. That's hard to beat...

Web-based Mario Sequencer

I was the only one in my group of gaming friends who dropped hard-earned lawnmower money on a copy of Mario Paint for the Super Nintendo. It came with the Super NES Mouse peripheral and provided hours upon hours of creative play through pixel art, animation, and—my personal favorite—the music generator. Now, enterprising fan and GitHub user minghai has taken an old Win95 version of the music sequencer and updated it to run in Chrome. Point your browser here to create your own fun 16-bit musical masterpieces. And unlike the original SNES version, which allowed users to "save" their work on a VHS tape via VCR, this one allows you to export your songs (in JSON).

Lovecraftian board game on Kickstarter

It's not being releasing under an open source license, but the new Cthulhu-inspired "maxi-micro" board game Shadows of Arkham is a part of the Labrats Testing Program. This means that while the Kickstarter campaign for the game is set to release a polished, professionally printed boxed game, anyone interested in helping out in the process can sign up and download print-and-play components. For the price of paper and ink, you can put together your own copy to playtest. You can even preview the rulebook as it's written and revised.

Game Develop goes open source

The easy-to-use, no-programming game engine, which failed to fund its Indiegogo campaign back in May, is now open source. Florian Rival, the toolkit's developer, announced the new licensing in a forum post on Monday, and updated the source on his GitHub account. Now anyone can download and contribute to Game Develop, which boasts HTML5 and native app export, as well as an events-based interface to help non-programmmers design their games.

Big thanks to Opensource.com staffers Bryan Behrenshausen and Jason Baker for their help in gathering stories this week. If you like our open source games coverage, be sure to follow us on Twitter for up-to-the-minute news.