Crossing Platforms: a Talk with the Developers Building Games for Linux

K.G. Orphanides — Wed, 08 Aug 2018 21:52:14 +0000

Games for Linux are booming like never before. The revolution comes courtesy of cross-platform dev tools, passionate programmers and community support.

In the last five years, the number of mainstream games released for Linux has increased dramatically, with thousands of titles now available. These range from major AAA releases, such as Civilization VI and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, to breakout indie hits like Night in the Woods

For this article, I spoke to different developers and publishers to discover the shape of the Linux games market and find out what's driving its prodigious growth.

Figure 1. Multi-award-winning comedy adventure game Night in the Woods is one of many games simultaneously released on Linux, macOS and Windows, thanks to development tools that can build for all three platforms.

Why Develop Games for Linux?

Support for Linux has boomed with the introduction of cross-platform development tools that make it comparatively easy to release titles on multiple operating systems. Perhaps more important, almost all the developers I spoke to personally support the Open Source movement, even if their games are proprietary.

For Zack Johnson, creative director of asymmetric's stick-figure comedy RPG, West of Loathing, the game's origins as a spin-off from popular browser game Kingdom of Loathing played a significant role.

"There was a vocal contingent of original Kingdom of Loathing players who urged us to [release a Linux version]", he said. "We knew we'd be able to get information and support from them during development, so it seemed like a worthwhile thing to do."

His experiences making an online game also helped form that decision: "My first game project was built on the LAMP stack, so I wouldn't have a career without open-source software. And just in general, it's hard to understate its importance to the fundamental underpinnings of the internet."

Figure 2. New Britannia, the online world created for Portalarium's Shroud of the Avatar, has been accessible to Linux users since its early pre-Alpha releases.

At Portalarium, the company behind Richard "Lord British" Garriott's latest fantasy RPG epic, Shroud of the Avatar, tech director Chris Spears says the drive to support Linux came from within:

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Crossing Platforms: a Talk with the Developers Building Games for Linux

Why Develop Games for Linux?