To celebrate Flotilla turning 10 years old, Blendo Games announced today that it's been made open source.
Flotilla is a mixture of a space exploration adventure, with turn-based tactical combat and branching events when you do the exploring. It only gained Linux support last year, when Ethan Lee ported it from XNA to the FNA project. Some of the features:
- No adventure is the same: Whenever you begin an adventure, the universe is randomly populated with characters, upgrades, and encounters.
- There is no "up" in space: Explore the tactical richness of full 3D movement. Watch your angles and flank the enemy from all directions.
- Configure your fleet: Find loot throughout your adventures, and install upgrades and artifacts to your flotilla of ships.
- Play with a friend: Grab a buddy and play through the adventure cooperatively in splitscreen.
- Blow up your friend: In the Skirmish Mode, set up custom fleets and battle human or computer-controlled enemies.
It's now under the zlib license, which is highly permissive so you can do pretty much anything with it. However, like a lot of open source release it does not include the assets so you still need to buy a copy for things like art/textures, audio and so on. This is a really good way to do it, keep the code open for people to fix it up and keep it alive but the developer can still easily earn monies with it.
Find the source up on GitHub, the game is available from itch.io and Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Curios if someone will make something nice with the engine.
Chuckaluphagus Feb 28, 2020
The downsides are:
a) The controls. They are, politely, not good. Homeworld should be the gold reference for 3D ship combat tactics, and diverge from that at your peril. The control issues dovetail with some camera bugs, where I'd be trying to pan around a ship to get a better angle for planning and suddenly the camera would zooooooom off to look at some other part of the scene. Tighten that up, and the game would instantly be back on my playlist, even without looking at
b) The enemy AI isn't great, and can be repetitive in its strategies. Then, even when you've nearly won a battle, it devolves into the last enemy ship running away, and your ships chasing it, very ... very ... slowly as you plink it's armor at maximum range. This is not a fun way to conclude a session. Then, when you're the one down to your last ship, it can be nearly impossible to win even a single a fight and start to regrow your fleet.
I have no ability to fix any of these issues, but I'd be happy if someone else would pick up the torch. Even just writing about it here makes me want to play some again, issues and all.
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