Penumbra: Overture

Helsingborg – Sweden - 14th of May 2010

Frictional Games is proud to announce the release of the source code for our first game Penumbra: Overture, together with the source code for the engine and tools used in its creation. This comes as a reply to the great success of the Humble Indie Bundle, in which over 1 million dollars has been donated to the participating developers and charities. Apart from Penumbra, the source codes for the indie games Aquaria, Gish and Lugaru (all available in the Humble Indie Bundle) are also released. We hope that these source code releases will be of use to the community, help aspiring game programmers and perhaps act as a base for other projects.

Penumbra: Overture contains a unique physics interaction system for first person games, a system that has been exclusive to the series and not found in any other game. With the release of the source code, we hope this will change as the interaction system can be used for much more than our genre specific horror games. The source code is currently running on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux – with the public release of the source code, perhaps even more platforms can be supported!

"We have been talking about releasing the engine and game code as open source for quite some time. With the success of the Humble Indie Bundle came the perfect opportunity and we decided to join the other games in releasing our code. Although the code for the game and engine encompass several years of work, it is not actively used today. It was basically just rotting away in the dark corners of our hard drives. It feels much better to have it published in the open, where it has a chance to grow and do some good. I hope that it will be found useful and I am excited to see what people can do with it!"

- Thomas Grip, Programmer and Co-Founder.

The source code has been uploaded to GitHub where it is easy for people to download the latest version, suggest patches, make new versions of the code and much more. To kick start the development we have also put up a dedicated section in our forum, where people can discuss the code and where we will try to provide as much help as we can. We have also written a more detailed overview of what the code contains in our blog, so interested parties should go there for more information.

Links of interest

http://github.com/FrictionalGames

Go here to get hold of the source code.

http://frictionalgames.com/forum/

Our official forums where more information and discussion about the source code release can be found. We hope that this will act as a fertile ground for people to get help, get into the source code and where we will try and provide help.

http://frictionalgames.blogspot.com/

The official blog that contains a post with a lengthier discussion of what the source code release contains.

http://www.penumbragame.com/

Information about Penumbra: Overture and the other games of the Penumbra series. Penumbra is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

http://www.wolfire.com/humble

The Humble Indie Bundle, where Penumbra: Overture and 5 other indie games can be purchased at a price of your own choosing. Also check here for more information on the open source releases of the other games.

About Frictional Games

We are a small independent game developer located in the south of Sweden or, to be more precise, located on the Internet - the company is office-free. We develop unique technologies in form of a game engine and tools that are tailored specifically after the games that we create. Currently with a crew of five in-house and a network of contractors to utilize during production we can be dynamic and efficient, increasing production at key moments. Visit http://www.frictionalgames.com/ for more information.