I like to think I’m an advocate for open-source and it’s easy when something like Vulkan comes out and bumps my framerates on DOOM up 15 frames or so, but other times I find it difficult such as right now when Ultimate Arena has gone several months without a pull request on Github from outside the company.
The truth is I’ve already got everything I wanted out of making Ultimate Arena open source. It’s a game made by ideas from the community, with code written by Triverske and art done by a 5 year old in paint. It’s not particularly well polished, nor high-budget, nor does it have the following that a lot of open source projects have. What Ultimate Arena does have is a quirky concept and the opportunity for anyone to pick it up and play and learn from it, and I think that’s enough to satisfy my expectations for now.
Open source introduces this sort of immortality to a project. Now that the code for Ultimate Arena is open source it will likely be around forever. There may be years, decades or possibly longer between pull requests. Someday someone will probably have to port the code out of Gamemaker and into something a bit more flexible (God bless their soul) and they’ll write about all the terrible decisions we made while making the game. There will be someone who inevitably finds out that this game had no definitive code format and how it’s held together by a few strips of duct tape in all the right places.
All that tangent to say we’ll continue to add content to Ultimate Arena and put the code on Github, at least in the near future. Someday I’ll hope another crazy teenager will take my silly idea and put their own twist on it, but I’m willing to wait a little longer.
Signed,
Troy Bonneau
President of Triverske
P.S. If my post somehow inspired you, check out Ultimate Arena on Steam and on Github.
