Frogatto & Friends
If you haven't checked it out already, I highly recommend taking a look at Frogatto, a free 2D platformer for Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. I've been playing it myself, and while I'm not far enough in to write a real review, what I can say is that the controls are smooth and natural and the graphics are all-around gorgeous. Plus, the game itself is just plain fun.
Of particular interest is the fact that Frogatto's engine is Open Source and completely moddable. While they've maintained the copyright on their images (they plan to sell their game on the iPhone), the engine itself is GPLed and quite feature-rich. It's also noteworthy that they contributed their previous art to OGA a while back, which you can find here.
Congrats to the Frogatto team on their 1.0 release!
EDIT: Ogrebane notes in a comment:
"It's worth mentioning that the designer and lead programmer of the FOSS TBS Battle for Wesnoth, David White, is the creator of Frogatto. Other Wesnoth contributors who are actively involved in the Frogatto project are Jetrel, crimson_penguin, Neorice, and shadowmaster."
Comments
It's worth mentioning that the designer and lead programmer of the FOSS TBS Battle for Wesnoth, David White, is the creator of Frogatto. Other Wesnoth contributors who are actively involved in the Frogatto project are Jetrel, crimson_penguin, Neorice, and shadowmaster.
I have been playing the demo, passed probably all currently playable levels and I just love it. Cute graphics, good controls, nice gameplay. I love platformer games, and so I like Frogatto very much.
Wow, thanks Bart. I totally didn't expect this. :D
As Bart said, we're protecting the copyright to much of our content - however, we're really big fans of indie gamemaking, having been in those straits before of having no decent art for our games, so we're planning on open-sourcing a couple more of our old assets. We're also open to requests - if there's something fairly *generic* in frogatto that you think would help you out, by all means, make a request that we open-source it. (For example, cursor images in the editor.)
The other huge thing people should be aware of is that frogatto has a fairly powerful AND flexible engine - it's able to do ... practically any 2d game, [i]without engine modifications.[/i] You could implement legend of zelda without changing a single line of code - practically all of our "business logic" is in our FML scripting language (which is a lot like haskell, for those interested). Not only are we interested in having other people write totally open-source games with it, we're also interested in helping anyone who wants to do a serious project with it, bring it up to the point where they could potentially sell it on the iPhone (or other platforms). We've done some incredible optimizations which would be really, really hard to duplicate - frogatto is able to run at full speed on the original iPhone, and that's a puny, 400mhz machine with less than 40 mb of free ram.
[b]If you're writing a 2d action game of any kind, PLEASE consider using our engine.[/b] That's why we made it, and why we GPLed the code. If you want to contact us about this, we've got an irc channel at #frogatto on freenode.net, and we've got forums et al at www.frogatto.com.
Tried Frogatto for the first time; I'm a sucker for well-made platformers. Well done!
The engine sounds impressive. I'll definitely have to take a look. Sounds like I can learn alot about engine design from it.
Bah! My ISP keeps throttling downloads *yes, my ISP sucks badly* I'm a sucker for 2d games, and more when they have a very vivid environment like frogatto *as they show in screenshots*
Well, anyways great job and I hope they make great profits out of it for the iPhone, they deserve it for their hard work :)