The game we’re developing is Squally, a 2D Platformer RPG that teaches assembly language. This game is cross-platform, and is written entirely in C++ using an engine called cocos2d-x.

We’ve been working on it for over a year now, and today it’s going open source. This is an extremely rare move in game development — after all, why would you give away years of hard work?

It’s not as crazy as it sounds.

Squally — our 2D Platformer RPG

The open source community seems to be thriving everywhere except video games. This is particularly tragic, because game development would benefit from this more than most fields.

Are most first-person shooters really so different that they should be written from scratch every time? Sure each game has its own unique feel, but the amount of redundant code written by game developers is staggering. Game engines have eased some of this pain, but still the wheel has been reinvented thousands of times.

If we could have forked somebody else’s game, it would have been a huge time saver. In fact, if somebody let us build on their game for $20,000, it would have been worth it. That’s how much money it would have saved us— and that’s not even accounting for lost time.