If you’re thinking of buying the anti-gravity racing game CoreBreach you may want to hold your proverbial horses: big things are happening.
CoreCode, the developers behind the title, are lowering the price of the game from $6.99 to $4.99.
This, they hope, will make the game a ‘more competitive’ purchase.
But that’s not all.
Open Source
The developers plan to open-source the game’s code ‘once sales cover costs’. Their target for this is 33,333 copies.
All sales of the game in 2011, regardless of desktop platform and distribution channel, count towards this aim. iOS sales, however, do not.
So far CoreCode haven’t given any direct indication of how many sales are still needed before this goal is reached.
But we can glean that at least 16,000 copies need to be sold based on this snippet from the F.A.Q on the CoreCode website:
“Once half of the target sales goal has been accomplished, we will install an “opensource-countdown” on the official homepage and update it weekly. Once more than 75% of the goal has been accomplished, the counter will be updated daily.”
At the time of writing there is no ‘opensource-countdown’ banner on their official homepage so, presumably, half of the sales goal has yet to be met.
Code, Not Game
It’s important to make the distinction that it’s only 20k lines of code in the game and the 3D engine it uses are pegged for open-sourcing – not the whole game itself.
The art, graphics, sound, models, etc can’t be open-sourced due to licensing restrictions. The company also have no plans to publish the ‘iOS specific part of the source code’, or the ‘online high score system’.
But that doesn’t mean there’s not potential to be had from its open-sourcing.
“Putting CoreBreach under a “open source” license will allow for some interesting possibilities,” the developers write on their blog.
“Anyone can modify the game e.g. to implement game play modifications or new game modes
The game can enter the packaging mechanisms of open source operating systems like Linux or BSD
[New games can be built] on the same 3D engine CoreBreach uses (“Core3D”) which is optimized for all major desktop operating systems as well as iOS devices like the iPhone.”
‘Best racing Game on Ubuntu’
We took CoreBreach for a spin earlier this year and, despite the oft-criticised graphics, were impressed with its performance, playability and value for money.
By dropping $2 of the price and dangling the carrot of GPL’d code CoreCode have made a sweet deal that little bit sweeter.