Half a decade to the day of its initial release, Anodyne 2 joined Even the Ocean in the realm of open source. As such, the project is now available for anyone to download and open with Unity 2017.4, and who knows what one might find when exploring just what makes this game tick?
But why make the project files readily available, even with the license in mind? Well, to quote Melos Han-Tani’s blog: “I believe one of the biggest issues to games getting better is a lack of community-led education.” In other words, when everything but the end result takes place behind closed doors, vast amounts of potential information will forever remain in a metaphorical vault, and none shall learn from neither mistakes nor successes.
Even when a game company has good internal training, rather than viewing games as a community and collective art form in which we all win, the more we all know, the console/arcade game industry treats it as an arms race in which we should be paranoid of competitors, and “keep it all in the family”.
That’s not to say the inner workings of Anodyne 2 can be uncovered in their entirety by firing up Unity and exploring every nook and cranny of code and assets alike, although some information is still better than none, and I’m sure someone out there will be able to put the contents of the Github repository to good use. Just, again, keep that license in mind.
(Source: Anodyne 2 Goes Open Source!)
