So I was thinking about making an open source game so people can take it apart and learn from it. But I wanted to know if there is any major downsides. I know about game stealing and other things being stolen. To make it clearer I want to know if there is any major downsides to making my game open sourced.
I’d say wait for the new collaboration tools to be released, as of right now there is no open source collaboration other than literally taking a copy of your game. People will have to closely communicate with you to present you with copies of the game for you to go through and make sure there’s no malicious code etc for you to then publish. Sure doing this under a group would help mitigate all of this, but it won’t remove bad actors completely. It would be better to wait until you can have a bit more control over the project itself for you to add collaborators as trusted members who won’t add malicious code.
I don’t mean for people to collaborate with me. Just look and the game and learn from it. I will edit the original post to make it clearer. It would probabl be a normal game but, it is open source. So people can open it up and look through to see how I made it and possibly even learn from it.
I totally encourage you to do this, it will be a good resource for new begginers. The thing is try to make it visible and showing it to the world.
Open source games aren’t mainly about fame or money. It’s more of wanting to help other poeple.
A good example would be Cone by Defaultio himself. This open source game is just the best, it’s prefected, deffintly deserves more attentions, and the best part is it has a lot of interesting stuff in it that basic and even good scripters always ask about. Sadly if you go to edit this game in the studio it is kind of hard to unedrstand since the way he loaded everything is quite weird but cool and also most scripts aren’t commented.
The thing is, try to bring in your game things that are frequently asked but with no clear answers, like how would I drag objects with my mouse or how on earth would I make a plane?
And for the downsides, other than copying the game I don’t thing there is anything to worry about.
And come on, if someone copies it who cares everyone will know about the original and how much it helped them.
When your game is done try to show it to people like here in the forum or other places so people can take this experience.
Cool! Thanks for your feedback! I did take a look at cone and did have some trouble figuring out the loading stuff…
I don’t understand the point of that game. Is it to teach people how to do intros?
If you want to do it, I say go for it. The only downside I can think of is if the game is stolen before the original (made by you) becomes popular. Then the whole things become useless. But if you properly post it here on the forums, throughout discord servers for ROBLOX development and some other places I am sure it will catch on and help a lot of people.
Once the game becomes popular itself, it can’t really be stolen and used in a malicious way. At least not anyways I can think of. But if you can do this, it would be incredible. Hundreds maybe even thousands of new programmers would be able to quickly and efficiently grasp the proper understanding of how games work and how to code them. The possibilities of open source are amazing. Think about all the open-source projects you have seen and how they have assisted so many people.
Take Blender for example, before Blender there was no real affordable way to start learning 3D. A lot of programs were hundreds or thousands of dollars. Basically, it was out of reach for a lot of people. But look just within ROBLOX alone. How many Blender artists have you seen just in ROBLOX that are incredibly talented, and they were able to pursue this passion because it was affordable and in their reach. This is exactly the same kind of effect an open-source game could have. It could answer hundreds of questions within new programmers.
In fact, I don’t even know why I am just mentioning programming. If this game you make follows good game design, good UX and UI design, good building, good concept, and all good practices, new developers pursuing any category of development can probably learn something out of it.
The only thing I would suggest is if you decide to do this make sure you do it right. All the code is clean, and written in the most efficient way. And its all well commented. And if you can, try to make it follow the ROBLOX Wiki as much as possible so when new programmers are learning they can learn consistently between the game and the ROBLOX wiki. If the game itself is not made well, it won’t help anyone much.
But yeah, amazing idea. Incredibly helpful. And I seriously respect you for you willing to put your own time and effort to help people while seeking no reward for your self.
Wow, thanks for that! I am going to try it. I will use your recommendation about the wiki, as well.
I’d rather use selective open-sourcing because exploiters, hackers, trollers, place stealers, etc are out there. Full open sourcing is not the best idea because these people can steal your place out of nowhere, without any credit. Just share parts of your game; If I was creating a working solar system I would only share some parts and scripts and leave the rest closed source to avoid place stealers getting the full game.
EDIT: Sorry for bumping into a inactive post.*