Hello,
I'm working with a few guys on a project for indie game developers. The two of them quit their jobs about a year ago to focus on building a marketplace for indie games that gives developers more freedom and opportunities to collaborate. We're now almost ready for an open beta, and we need both games and people to help us test the platform.

To that end, we thought we might hold a competition to find some noteworthy open source games. The goal of the competition would be to grant recognition to open source developers who have contributed to the community in a way you feel is important. Since our platform is based on indie game development, we're looking to celebrate the work of open source indies you love, granting their developers some recognition and allowing us to feature some favorite open source games from the community in our marketplace.

What do you think of this idea? Who are some people in the community with open source projects that you think deserve recognition?

Here's the blog with guidelines for the competition: http://digitalmancompetition.wordpress.com/. I'll be improving the site based on your feedback to make sure it's as awesome as possible, so feel free to drop your advice below. If you think the structure of the competition itself needs to be heavily modified I'll gladly take your suggestions. We'll be running more competitions in the future, so any input now would be great.

Thanks,
Samuel

are you sure you want to restrict it to just open source indies?

The restriction will be just for this first one. We'll have competitions in the coming months for theme-based game development and other fun things, but for the moment the simplest way to move the games over to the platform is for them to be open source.

It certainly cuts our initial options down, but we thought it'd be a nice start. Do you think it'd be a good idea to have a similar contest for all open/closed source games after this one? Our next contests are going to be original game development ones, though I can see the benefit of doing a similar contest with closed source games prior.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Samuel

Quote: Original post by squamulus
The restriction will be just for this first one. We'll have competitions in the coming months for theme-based game development and other fun things, but for the moment the simplest way to move the games over to the platform is for them to be open source.

It certainly cuts our initial options down, but we thought it'd be a nice start. Do you think it'd be a good idea to have a similar contest for all open/closed source games after this one? Our next contests are going to be original game development ones, though I can see the benefit of doing a similar contest with closed source games prior.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Samuel

I'm just thinking you should start off with as many games as possible, and being open to a larger pool with open and closed source gives you that.

Not 100% sure on the goals of your site, so it might not mesh.

Ah, gotcha.

One of the main tenets of the system is increasing collaboration between developers, so open source (not synonymous with 'free') games and tools are going to serve as the backbone of the platform. In the interest of increasing developer collaboration, we're trying to avoid the use of closed source software.

Does that make sense? If you have any other questions let me know.

I realize now that the hyperlink never worked.

Apologies for such oversight on my part, here's the link you can copy and paste into your browser:

http://digitalmancompetition.wordpress.com/

So far we've received 10 nominations for the best open source game on the web. There's been some rule clarification and even a list of open source games posted along the way, so feel free to follow the link below and put your 2 cents in.

Thanks for the support,
Samuel

Quick update:

We've collected 14 nominations so far, and here they are in no particular order:
1) Battle for Wesnoth
2) FreeCiv
3) Frozen Bubble
4) Shotgun Debugger
5) BOFH
6) Pink Pony
7) Kernel Panic
8) Complete Annihilation
9) Red Eclipse
10) Syntensity
11) Alien Arena
12) Sleep is Death
13) Nexuiz
14) Xonotic

If you have a favorite that has not yet been suggested, come to www.digitalmancompetition.wordpress.com and toss your nomination in.

Thanks,
Samuel

The day has arrived.

Voting for the best open source game on the web has begun. We've broken the list down into 10 genres. Vote on the art, innovation, storyline, and overall gaming experience to decide what games from the 10 genres will go head to head in the final round.

I'll post some results every day so you can see how your game, and gaming community, stacks up against the rest.

*dons battle cap*

Here's the competition site: http://digitalmancompetition.wordpress.com

Thanks,
samuel

If you have any questions about the WorldKi platform, check out http://worldki.com/product.html

So, I'm looking at your list, and I just figured you'd want to know:

Complete Annhilation is not actually Open-Source, because even though the project is open, it uses proprietary assets.

In addition, Sleep is Death is not actually Open-Source at all. Sure, the source is published, but the licence terms are not OSI.

Thanks for the posting, Steve. We had a large rush of nominations right before voting was scheduled to be up, so in my haste to get the site polished I must've glanced over them. I'll get them sorted out to be sure they can't infringe on the actual open source games. Thanks for the headsup.
-samuel