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Let's do it! ALL FOSS!

A topic by Pigdev created Mar 29, 2019 Views: 1,042 Replies: 24
Viewing posts 1 to 8
(1 edit) (+4)

Heyo fellas, I'm Pigdev, an indie game developer that only dev with FOSS!

So here goes my list of tools you can use to get that bonus point.

  • Graphics
    • GIMP for image manipulation such as color adjusting, cropping, transform, etc...Not good for drawing tho
    • Krita, this one is really good for hand drawing, so you can create your graphic assets with it
    • Inkscape also good for vector drawing
    • Blender for 3D assets
    • Goxel for voxel art
  • Audio
    • LMMS for music composition, you can also use its build in SFXR to synth sound effect, great tool!
    • Audacity for final cuts and audio manipulation: normalize, equalize, compress, etc...
  • Animation
    • You can use Krita for traditional frame by frame animation
    • Synfig for Cutout/Vector animation, good for cutscenes and trailers
    • Blender for Cutout/Vector animation as well
    • If you prefer, you can use Godot's Built-in animation system to make procedural animations
  • Engines
    • Godot for both 3D and 2D games, it provides all sort of tools and works with a Node composition system. Exports to all sorts of platforms, including Linux, Windows and Mac.

By the way here are the 4 major tools I use on daily basis for gamedev:

Submitted

Thank you for all these great suggestions! How does Inkscape compare to Krita for 2D game graphics? When would you use one over the other?

(+2)

Although Krita has vector drawing support, it is not good compared to Inkscape, for instance check it out GDQuest's review on the feature:

Krita is really powerful when it comes to hand/free drawing since its strengths come from the raster drawing engine, so if you have a tablet and you have the skills to draw using a pen or something, Krita is the totally go for it option.

Inkscape is focused on vector drawing, it's really powerful when it come to boolean operations, vector effects (like bending, twisting, etc...). It is really powerful making complex shapes out of the box and you just need to arrange them. It is also a powerful solution for designing UI elements, design screens, etc...

If you have the skills for hand drawing and is a good designer as well, I'd say the following:

Use Krita for:

  • Characters
  • Objects
  • Environment
  • In-game art (item's thumbnails, character's portraits...)

Use Inkscape for:

  • UI elements
  • Level Design
  • Icons of all sorts (item's icons, menu icons, emojis for in-game [like those Ragnarok emoticons], etc...)
  • Anything that needs clean graphics

Although you can use both solutions for the problems presented. As an example I use Inkscape for everything that is graphic related.

(2 edits) (+3)

Most of the things I use have been already mentioned, but I've also came up with these:

- GDevelop - a pretty cool engine for making games without any coding
- Ardour - an alternative to LMMS, works better for recording live instruments
- beepbox.co - small and handy tool for 8-bit melodies
- Qt Creator - my IDE of choice :v

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(+1)

What about tic80 or love2d?

(2 edits) (+2)

Actually for voxel graphics consider using voxelshop.
It is also foss but it integrates with Godot far better because of export options. You can export things with color via .dae unlike Goxel.
Just take care to import texture properly as a pixel texture.
https://github.com/simlu/voxelshop

(1 edit)

That's awesome, I wasn't aware of this tool! Thanks a lot.

(1 edit) (+1)

Also I found that a surprisingly good drawing tool, including vector brushing, is OpenToonz.
https://github.com/opentoonz/opentoonz

I've actually made a whole jam game with such graphics once although it was rather on simplistic side.
(https://houkime.itch.io/withoutcowboy
You can measure the drawing time of all assets in making-of video https://peertube.social/videos/watch/8324b398-71ce-4108-99ba-e61a0029a9a3)

Because it is a dedicated animation tool you can do animated sprites right away.
And vector-drawn frame-by-frame animated sprites look quite cool and have unlimited resolution.
I have even submerged them into godot 3d space and they still look gorgeous even if i spent like 5 minutes on them. 

It has some hiccups but I found it much easier and quicker to use than Krita on many occasions.

For pixelart non-animated graphics I can recommend mtPaint as a very straightforward and easy to use solution.
http://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/
Unfortunately no bells an whistles like symmetry-related tooling in this one.

And yes, i made a whole game with such graphics too and it was quick as hell ^_^
https://houkime.itch.io/road-to-self-assurance

for anything pixel related, i like aseprite. You can get the source code on github for free or buy the built one. But its really not hard to compile yourself.

also on an unrelated note, im looking for where the theme is announced, i havent found it :p can someone point me in the right direction

(+1)

Aseprite is not FOSS anymore. Tho there is a really awesome alternative for it the LibreSprite, is basically the same thing. They even have a flatpack version, and the source code under a FOSS license.

https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.libresprite.LibreSprite

https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite

(-1)

Well the Jam page says "Open Source", not "Free software" or "FOSS".

The Aseprite case is kinda complicated as it used to be GPL until the dev felt unfairly treated by Linux distributions.

Have in mind, Open Source, especially when you are aware of the topic, means FOSS. I had this discussion on twitter just the past week

https://twitter.com/Akien/status/1113386979528445952

(+1)

It's simple, if you mean FOSS, say FOSS.

(2 edits)

When you ignore the ethical intention behind it, those terms are in practice synonymous. The term FOSS/FLOSS was created strictly because "free software" and "open source" describe exactly the same thing, to be able to use it without explicitly standing on any side of that moral battle.

The problem with "Open Source" is that we can't know what the author meant by it. It's not a question of ethics at this point, it's a question of precise language. That he used "freely licensed assets", which could mean any number of things, makes it obvious that he was just very sloppy.

He could have used any of the definitions of FLOSS that are available and at least "copyleft or public domain" for the assets or whatever. He didn't. We can't know what he meant.

(2 edits)

The term "Open Source" is very clearly defined: https://opensource.org/osd

Unless you have some reason to assume that somebody is using this term mistakenly (which may happen with any term), there's no problem with it.

Actually, "copyleft or public domain" is a bad term, because it would exclude things like Godot Engine, which is neither copyleft nor public domain (it's MIT). Don't use terms like that, use the clearly defined ones like "open source", "free software" or "FLOSS" - they all mean the same.

How can you be sure he meant the OSI approved licenses? He clarified his 'freely licensed', quite possibly he was sloppy here as well and meant FSF approved licenses, or either, or something else entirely.

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(1 edit) (+1)

You are really trying to say that Gardiner, someone articulated in the topic, would say Open Source so naively to the point to mean simply "we have access to the source code"?

It's clear that the jam uses "Open Source" as the definition of the Free Software Foundation. And Aseprite doesn't fit this definition.

Sure ... https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html

(1 edit)

if you took the time to read the twitter thread I shared, you would understand why this is not the case anymore.

It's not complicated - it's very simple. Unless you use the old GPL version, it's not open source.