After several months of flattened sales I decided that I had garnered all the income I was likely to get from my game The Captain’s Log (enough for my wife and I to grab a nice dinner out, which is better than a good number of my games in the past). Now it was time to squeeze out a little more value and learn about open sourcing!
For me, making games has never been about the money. I want to learn something new, tackle a coding challenge, and test out ideas. By making The Captain’s Log open source, I wanted to learn three new things:
- Practically, how does open-sourcing work?
- What are the options for open source licenses?
- How do I upload something to GitHub?
After surprisingly little by the way of hemming and hawing, The Captain’s Log is now free to download and modify on GitHub. I used the MIT License, which basically means that people can do anything they like with the code as long as they attribute me as the source. Incidentally, GitHub has setup a great website to help make these kinds of decisions.
I have at least one friend who will shake his head in dismay, but I used GitHub’s desktop client to do the syncing. Generally I like my tech to be as easy as possible, and the GUI fit my needs just fine. From idea to execution the process of preparing my Unity project for sharing to uploading took under an hour — I recommend this blog for a guide.
For what it’s worth, The Captain’s Log is a game about being lost in space — I was inspired by watching a lot of Star Trek: Voyager with my wife and musing about what a great game the premise of Voyager offered. Hopefully someone in the open source community will find the game to be interesting and build upon what I started. What a wonderful outcome that would be for joining the open-source community.