Avara Open-Sourced

Great news just in: another Ambrosia classic has received an open source release. As of this week, Avara is now available as open source. There’s a lot of work that goes into creating a playable game from that (it took a year for Antares) but releasing the code is the first step.

If you’ve got the time, also check out the 20th Anniversary Livestream.

To my knowledge, there are now three Ambrosia games from the MacOS Classic era that have been open-sourced:

• Avara, since 2016.
• Maelstrom, the oldest of the bunch, since 1999 (17 years!). The data files have also been freely available since 2010.
• And of course, Ares, since 2008.

Aside from that, there are a couple of other projects in the open source community based on old Ambrosia games:

• Endless Sky is an EV-alike that I enjoyed playing through. While it introduces some new gameplay systems to distinguish itself (power! heat!) it really captured for me a lot of what I enjoyed about the original.
• delvmod is a set of tools for modding Cythera. The official release of Cythera was complete (but buggy) and had a mod patcher (but no tool for mod creation). delvmod has already been used to fix the fishing and Fetch bugs.

For even more open-source games, like Bungie’s Abuse and Marathon, see osgameclones.com.