Wolfire Games Open Sources 'Overgrowth' After 14 Years of Development

"We have worked on Overgrowth for 14 years," begins their new announcement. Development first began in 2008, and the game runs on Windows, macOS and Linux platforms. Overgrowth's page on Wikipedia describes the realistic 3D third-person action game as "set in a pre-industrial world of anthropomorphic fighter rabbits, wolves, dogs, cats and rats."

And now, "Just like they did with some earlier games, Wolfire Games have now open sourced the game code for Overgrowth," reports GamingOnLinux. "[J]ump, kick, throw, and slash your way to victory.... The source code is available on GitHub. You can buy it on Humble Store and Steam."

The Overwatch site adds as a bonus that "we're also permanently reducing the game's price by a third worldwide" (so U.S. prices drop from $29.99 to $19.99).

"Only the code is getting open sourced," the announcement notes, "not the art assets or levels, the reason is that we don't want someone to build and sell Overgrowth as their own." Wolfire CEO Max Danielsson explains in a video that "you'll still have to own the game to play and mod it." "What it does mean, however, is that everyone will have full and free access to all our source code, including the engine, project files, scripts, and shaders.

"We'll be releasing it under the Apache 2.0 license, which allows you to do whatever you want with the code, including relicensing and selling it, with very few obligations. We tried to keep this easy...

"This isn't the next big engine. We don't intend to compete with any other great open source game engines like Godot, which is a great option if you're looking for a general-purpose game engine. But if you're interested in looking at what shipped game code can look like, want to look at specific code, like the procedural animation system, or if you're an Overgrowth modder who wants to make an involved total conversion mod, then this is for you.
"We have wanted to open source Overgrowth for a long time," says the announcement on Wolfire's site, "and we are incredibly grateful to our team and community for making this happen.

"We are excited to see what people do with this code and we look forward to the spirit of Overgrowth living on for another 14 years."

Godot game engine?

[dgatwood]

There's seriously a game engine called Godot? Was it worth waiting for? Or is that a joke about its performance?

Re:

[gardyloo]

The end of wanting to add new features will never arrive. https://rmll.ubicast.tv/videos... [ubicast.tv]

Re:

[SoftwareArtist]

I'm still waiting for it. But they promise it's going to be amazing!

Jokes aside, yes it's a real thing. It's the closest the open source community has produced to a replacement for Unity or Unreal Engine. It can't yet compete with the commercial engines on features, but it still does a lot.

Modding?

[DrMrLordX]

So how much of a modding community do they have already? Obviously this is targeted at the werewolf/furry community, and it apparently has been in early access since 2017. Did they ever release a gold master edition or is it still stuck in early access? My own cursory research makes that unclear.

Re:

[imidan]

Just checking them out here and there, it looks like they did an early access and it progressed through to an official release in October 2017. And they claim to have an active mod community, but I didn't look into it. I watched some gameplay video and for some reason found the combat violence to be oddly off-putting. Maybe because it was a rabbit-man? I don't know. Anyway, whatever it is, it looks fairly competently made, especially for an indie game.

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

Well I saw something similar, though it seemed like they went early access in 2017? Anyway it looks pretty niche regardless.

Re:

[systemd-anonymousd]

2017? I remember my friend telling me about this in 2008

Re:Modding?

[DrMrLordX]

It was in development for a long time.

The way it should be done

[ThoolooExpress]

Opening up decades-old source code costs little, but is amazing for the community. Within a few years, all the parts of your game you wouldn't want your competition to see have already been either made obsolete by hardware changes, figured out by everybody independently, or reverse engineered from the binary, if you managed to do something really, really clever. The only reason not to open source old game code after 10 years is planned obsolescence and / or corporate paranoia (oh no, what if one of our deve

Re:

[Darinbob]

Do they have modding tools though? Ie, can you create and modify assets and the world easily? The first major part worked on for Bethesda's Morrowind was the Construction Set, and the same tool was released with the game and the modding community took that and ran making Bethesda's games have the most active modding community out there. Having just the source code is relatively limiting; you can fix game engine bugs, but if you want to fix bugs in quests or create new items, areas, or do a completel overh

Legendary animation talk at GDC

[UnknownSoldier]

Wolfire's talk Animation Bootcamp: An Indie Approach to Procedural Animation [youtube.com] at GDC 2014 will be interest to any game developer, not just those doing animation be it animator or programmer.

That's pretty cool they open sourced their engine. It will be interesting to dig through it and see what other gems they have.

This is a good thing, just brings sad memorys.

[WarlockD]

One thing I have always wanted was the library that the original Doom used for its music driver. Since it was a 3rd party bit of software that was purchases and id didn't have the rights to publish it. Of course after 25+ years, that software is long gone. I just really wish there was some secure depository to save stuff like this. Not for just a sound driver, but firmware source code, proprietary or not even if it stays in a vault for eternity (aka googles book scanning database)