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After recently releasing the first major post-release update, the developer of the action-roguelike Burning Knight decided to open source the whole thing.

What is it? Similar in action to the likes of Nuclear Throne, Enter The Gungeon and a little Isaac sprinkled in and others like it - you get to blast through procedurally generated dungeons while unlocking more and more items to play with. Various different weapons and status effects, hats to collect and much more hidden.

It released back in June 2020, check out some footage below:

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If you wish to read some behind the scenes info, we did an interview with the developer back in July that's worth a read. Catching up with Egor again when this open sourcing was announced on October 8, they said to us that it still didn't go well financially for them but by open sourcing it "hopefully someone will find something useful and learn from it" and they noted to us that when they were starting out something like this "would've helped me a ton" - so they're doing it to give back.

Thanks to this you can now find the whole source, including the media assets under the GPL on GitHub. Technically, that actually makes the game entirely free with this being what is currently on Steam right now.

You can support the developer by buying a copy where it's available on itch.io and Steam plus can also grab the soundtrack on Bandcamp.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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6 comments

Akien Oct 9, 2020
Amazing move! I'm a firm believer in FOSS gaming and I love to see commercial games release their source code (and even more so with all assets).

I hope it helps it reach a broader audience and actually get more sales - at least I picked up my own copy :)
Julius Oct 9, 2020
Another one of those titles on Steam that even though are right up my ally never even registered. Well I guess open-sourcing your game is a good way to do PR as well :)

Edit: Too bad the developer seems to treat this as a code-dump and even disabled issue tracking. I mean still great that he did release it, but no help in getting it compiled or an easy central location to merge back in improvements kind of sucks.


Last edited by Julius on 9 October 2020 at 11:18 pm UTC
Pozzuoli Oct 10, 2020
I don't have a problem with no issue tracking; that's their prerogative. But I have no idea how to actually run the game. Some minimal instructions might have been nice! Has anyone had any success?
Julius Oct 10, 2020
For anyone wondering, with monodevelop 7.8.4 it is possible to get the source to work.
Akien Oct 10, 2020
I don't have a problem with no issue tracking; that's their prerogative. But I have no idea how to actually run the game. Some minimal instructions might have been nice! Has anyone had any success?

I got things working with mono 6.12.0.90, msbuild and nuget installed from the upstream Mono repos: https://www.mono-project.com/download/stable/
(They actually don't support my distro Mageia but I can hack around to use the Fedora/RHEL packages.)

Then to build:

 
nuget restore
msbuild


And run:
cd Desktop/bin/Debug/
mono Desktop.exe


That's the debug version, which has debug tools but no music/sfx as pointed out in the readme. For those, build a release version instead:

msbuild /p:Configuration=Release
cd Desktop/bin/Release/
mono Desktop.exe


Hope this helps :)
Guest Oct 11, 2020
Another one of those titles on Steam that even though are right up my ally never even registered. Well I guess open-sourcing your game is a good way to do PR as well :)

Edit: Too bad the developer seems to treat this as a code-dump and even disabled issue tracking. I mean still great that he did release it, but no help in getting it compiled or an easy central location to merge back in improvements kind of sucks.

Hey, sorry about that. I’ve opened the issue and added building instructions. I did not add them at first, because I thought that opening a .sln file in a c# ide was obvious, but ofc not everyone has experience with c# so I’ve added proper build instructions.

Tnx, Egor
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