I am amazed by the current state of open-source tooling. It came a long way from “just a hobby project made in the attic”. Recently, I spoke with Marcel Visser from Dot Asterisk. He creates not only the code but also the 3D assets and music, all by himself, using only open-source tools.
His latest game, Juggle Star DX, was also built with only open source tools as a solo developer! With even an Android release!
Screenshot of the opening screen of Juggle Star DX
Why open source?
Did it feel like a constraint to work with only open source?
Not really, only at specific times. Unreal has had much more time to invest in graphical maturity, for instance, but I don’t miss it in Godot. Blender has been amazing as of late, so has Godot.
Was budget or principal a big factor in going open source?
The budget to buy a lot of commercial products is there. Not interested, though. These are my default tools for small projects and studying. They also work well enough when going for something bigger. They suit my workflow.
Game Engine: Godot
Godot was first released in 2014 by two Argentine developers, Juan Linietsky and Ariel Manzur. Over the years, the team has grown all over the world to make and maintain this open source game engine.
If we look at the trend of GDScript (a script specially made for Godot) on GitHub, we can see the growing popularity of Godot.
Graph showing the increasing number of pushes done to GitHub with GDScript.
What was your experience with Godot?
At first, my experience was not great, this was in the 3.x days. But with 4.x, especially since 4.3, things have gotten really good and stable. Besides, the occasional crash worked great.
3D assets: Blender
Blender is 3D computer graphics software. Fully free of charge and open source. The Dutch software developer Ton Roosendaal is the main developer who launched it in 1994 as part of the now-defunct NeoGeo company. The project went through a few phases till it ended up in the non-profit Blender foundation where in 2002 it became open source.
Blender stays developing with about 3 million a year, mainly thanks to sponsors, like AMD, Nvidia, Intel, Apple, Epic Games, and Meta, but also a significant part from individual contributors.
The Blender logo
How is Blender?
Blender has been an absolute blast. Since 2.8, the workflow has been intuitive enough to work with, and since 4.x, everything’s been really streamlined. It’s a great tool. I only wish there were better support for AMD cards on Linux, because I don’t want to deal with the wonky proprietary drivers. I’m stuck with CPU rendering in Cycles.
Did you hide your first donut in the game?
Haha, no, not Blender-ready for sure, but I did re-use older stuff I made earlier!
For some context: A very popular Blender tutorial is by Blender Guru; his first tutorial is always to make a donut.
Audio
What did you use as audio software?
I did use FL Studio for one song; this was the only time I used the closed-source software in this product. After that, I used MuseScore and Audacity for the heavy lifting and some light touches with the audio programming in Godot.
Audio: MuseScore
MuseScore Studio is the open source software of MuseScore created in 2008 by Werner Schweer, Nicolas Froment, and Thomas Bonte (from Germany, France, and Belgium).
Besides the open source project, the MuseScore company is a social sharing website. Here, sheet music, lessons, an AI music assistant, and other music-related products are shared and sold.
A sample of MuseScore Studio showing how sheet music looks within the application. The music is “Green Eggs” by Marcel Visser.
What made you choose MuseScore?
MuseScore is not an application I would recommend to serious musicians, nor does it have the best and most sustainable business model, but does the job well enough. For me especially important to get sketches out quickly because my workflow is with sheet music. It makes it a lot easier for me to think in intervals and parse my harmonies semantically than doing things in a DAW (digital audio workstation), where things are obscured a bit by enharmonicism.
How did the experience differ between FL Studio, and MuseScore with Audacity?
FL Studio is also a bit looked down upon in the DAW ecosphere, but it works well enough for me to get out some electronic production that sounds good to me. I also appreciate the very consumer-friendly commercial strategy. Because of semantic erosion, actual part writing is harder, but usually I’m past that phase when switching to there (barring some embellishments or things that start to sound too dissonant because of the instrument chosen).
Video editing: Kdenlive
Kdenlive is a video editing software part of KDE. It was launched in 2003 by Jason Wood, but was stopped for 2 years till Jean-Baptiste Mardelle picked it up in 2005, who is still part of the current development.
It is part of the German non-profit KDE e.V.
Video editing: Kdenlive — What made it so unpleasant? Would a closed-source alternative be better?
Using Kdenlive, especially in the past, was quite crash-prone. The UX is, unfortunately, a bit hammy with having to configure everything over and over. It has a palette of video effects, but something that I would consider simple, like shaking, isn’t present, and you have to work your way around that. A lot of things are missing, like having a default export folder, quick presets, user-friendly encoding settings (very ffmpeg-wrapped), etc. I’ve had much smoother experiences with Sony Vegas in the early 10’s. It didn’t crash, had much better frame-by-frame and speed manipulation, and effects stacked more naturally. I do prefer using a FOSS variant, though, even given the discomfort.
Lastly
Let’s talk about the bigger picture outside the individual tools used.
What would you do differently?
Many things. I’d get a better UI scaling system from the outset. I’d want to set up some asset pipelines before going, with more nodes that actually fit more towards Godot’s philosophy of working. I’d change my release windows to better suit player sentiment, and one of the more important things is that I will most likely kill the next game that I’m targeting for bigger audiences faster if it doesn’t seem good enough. I’ve committed to finishing this one, really just to get through the motions of things, but I’d like to be more wise about that with developing upcoming ones. This one was set up as an educational experience from start to finish, and it has been wildly successful in that regard so far.
Conclusion
Talking with Marcel and playing his latest game gives a clear idea of how mature open source has become. It feels like a miracle that today you can make a professional game using nothing but free and open source software tools.
It is not to a state where every triple-A game can be made with it, and there is a good business reason to still pay for closed software tools, but it is not the only solution anymore.
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