Lincity-NG is an open source clone of Simcity 2000. That, right there, is the major problem with this game – we’ve been there, done that, bought the T-Shirt, screwed the goats. Other than that, the gameplay is fine (it doesn’t seem to quite have the complexity of the commercial game) and the 3D engine is fantastic. Here’s hoping that the developers have made the game engine modular enough so that other people can develop new games on top of it. In fact, that seems to be a general problem with open source/Linux games – many of the game engines are great, but the gameplay itself is a little tired and cliched. Am I wrong?
Comment (1)
Yeah, but the price is right. You’re not going to get the same kind of experience from a game where a team of experienced project managers, developers and programmers are getting paid 6 figures to work full time versus programmers who work on a game for fun part time as a hobby. Its just not going to happen. Although there’s a lot of great examples of this happening in other software areas besides games it just doesn’t seem to happen with games. Probably because games are extracurricular anyway.