Highly suggest connecting with one of the lead developers, Charles Dang/Vultraz, if you have any C++ jobs in the USA.
He's been a developer on Wesnoth since 2012 but only graduated university in 2024. Unfortunately, it's been an absolutely brutal market for new graduates. Even if you're a maintainer on one of the most popular OSS C++ projects on GitHub.
Even with 5 (albeit small) linux kernel patches, 2 Firefox patches.. employers weren’t interested. I’ve stopped contributing to open source completely. I’m considering switching fields. It was interesting but these days I need some ROI, personally.
Thanks,our company is in the DC area so I just reached out with an offer to chat. Wesnoth is an incredible project, I can't believe he doesn't have a programming job.
I am very surprised if he can't find a job, as an American, in DC, with 12 years of C++ experience. Sure companies aren't great at assessing open source experience, but there is one area its easy to find a job as a dev: work that requires a clearance.
St. John’s college is a great place that draws a special type of young person, but its graduates are not very STEM-legible. As far as I know they still offer no choice of major & no hands-on classes — just the great books.
Of course that makes this person’s skill all the more impressive.
> Unfortunately, it's been an absolutely brutal market for new graduates.
Furthermore, more and more companies are looking for "professional" devs using AI tools such as Claude Code. By "professional" I mean proficient in using those AI tools, not actual knowledge. And they don't even specify this in the job offer and you learn this during the interview.
I don't understand why you're downvoted. Many of my 2025 graduate friends are seeing this problem.
Unlimited token-based usage of Claude Code is not in the budget for many students and employees.
At the same time, companies are demanding experience with these tools.
This is stratifying the industry. I have many talented classmates that can only use free GitHub Copilot. They're likely being screened out in favour of rich classmates with $200/month Claude subs.
As a result, they'll be more likely to get low-paying jobs that don't provide access to top-tier AI tools and the effect will compound.
I think this'll be even worse as Claude phases out subsidies.
If $2000/month subscription to Claude for 4 years of university is the minimum required for a Big Tech job, this field is going to become law/finance levels of cliquey.
Nobody is talking about that because it's bad for both AI booster and skeptic narratives but it's happening.
My only gripe with the game is that healing doesn't give XP to the healing units. This means you need to place them in combat to level up instead of placing them behind the fighters like they are intended to be, and with them initially having low health they are very squishy. I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP and then getting them to attack, but it feels like going against their role.
> It is felt that allowing units to gain experience without risk would make leveling-up of such units inevitable. Further, one of the motivating examples of this is so that units such as shaman can have a hope to level up in multiplayer. It is pointed out that if the experience gains were high enough to allow shaman to level up in a single multiplayer game, then it would be trivial to gain the best type of healing unit in a campaign very quickly.
It depends. Personally I think they should make alternatives more easy. For instance, under Options, for people to pick other ways to level up. Does not have to be 1000000 ways, just, say 3-5 ways in total, first one being the main default and only the main default is kept balanced, the rest can be unbalanced, just allowed per option as-is.
Isn't the strategy then to keep them behind the fighter units, wait until an enemy is 1 HP away from death, make the healer advance and make a kill, then put a fighter in front of them again?
I've enjoyed this, honestly. There's a whole short-term pain/long-term gain tradeoff to risking healers that adds more strategy to the campaign.
> I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP
In practice, I've found it difficult to get monsters to 1-2 HP since it often means not using your most powerful attacks. On harder difficulties I usually can't afford the opportunity cost.
Yeah I personally found this to be a big part of the tactical and strategic challenge. It reminded me a lot of Pokemon where you have a similar challenge, of slotting "exposure to fighting" into a limited action and HP budget.
Edit: Now that I think about it, most turn-based games have this mechanic. It's almost an idiomatic balance/design decision in gaming.
Compare to Dota where support heroes have acquired more and more opportunities for assist gold/XP, it does in some sense make the game "easier" for the support players, but then the game is harder in other ways because now the supports are all way more farmed and dangerous than in older versions. It's the difference between controlling an army of many units and having to manage them all, versus controlling one unit and needing to work together within a team.
An indirect compensation is that these units require less XP to advance, but I understand your concern too.
> I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP and then getting them to attack, but it feels like going against their role.
This is a problem with the XP-per-kill system. Wesnoth could use a variant instead. I use the above strategy all the time to level the healers up.
Note that elven units have slow (their healers), which is very powerful in its own right for getting a kill on a unit. First slow, then deal damage with other units.
I loved this game playing on an Arch Thinkpad in university with budget graphics capability.
The best part is being able to pin locations on the map for your teammates, so we were able to plot the adventures and battlegrounds of a goated unit by naming the pins "Ronant's Triumph," "Ronant's Revenge," "Ronant's Folly," and ultimately "Ronant's Last Stand." Great times with a few beers and the lads.
RIP Ronant, Wesnoth will never see another hero of your like again.
If that's your jam then there's also a (non-open-source) "Hero's Hour" which tickles the old Heroes of Might and Magic stylings, works reasonably well on Xbox, where I've been doing most of my gaming lately.
As far as Open Source gaming success stories, I'd put this up there in the Top 5 for "Original IP and Concept" (if that makes sense). Just a stellar labor of love, worth giving it a shot to play!
- Supertux2, it got recently revamped, the quality skyrocketed. Much better controls and artwork.
- Supetux Advance, this is really great too.
- Retux (More Wariolike than Mario)
- Nethack/Slashem. A Roguelike more bound to interaction/exploration/mechanics than combat, but Slashem makes combat crazy with the Doppleganger Monk, which is basically a Shonen Manga, the role. (Dragon Ball/Naruto depending on your age).
- DCSS. Basically, not Nethack/Slashem, much more combat oriented
than the Slashem combinatorics playing with the Monk a la Jackie Chan, this is more like an ARPG made a Rogue.
- Frotz/Lectrote/Winfrotz/whatver Z Machine interpreter and "All Things Devour". Spiritwrak, too. Great libre text adventures and still enganing because of weird mechanics.
- Frozen Bubble
- OpenArena.
- FreeDoom, better compiled with Deutex on daily builds.
- FreeCiv.
- OpenTTD today can be standalone enough.
- Frozen Bubble
- Minetest+tons of subgames such as Glitch, Nodecore...
- OOlite
- Speed Dreams. If the controls are hard, try the arcade mode. If the controls are still hard, get SupertuxKart, pick some real life car from the addons and get all the SD tracks from the inline downloader, they are several.
The Free Civ and Free Colonization games are good. Brogue, Nethack, DCSS are good if you like roguelikes. OpenMW is a totally open source reimplementation of Morrowind, so that might fit the bill.
It's under the "add-ons" menu in game. I would recommend playing the top-ranked campaigns. Some amazing stuff in there. I adore Legend of the Invincibles. Fun story, tons of new gameplay mechanics.
An absolute gem I came across randomly many years ago. Picked up Mewgenics and it left me wishing it had some mechanics from Wesnoth like faster animations (Mewgenics caps at 4x), undo action (at least if the action doesn't trigger any rng/damage behavior), skip enemy turns.
I only wish they added more campaigns into the official lore.
What is pretty cool is how long-living the project has been. I have seen many open source games die over the last 2 decades; some were quite cool. So wesnoth staying alive is pretty epic in itself.
I heard about this game many many times due to software developers showcasing it as an example of a good libre videogame. However, I don't know a single person who played it and I have never seen anyone recommending it for its gameplay.
It is a relatively simple formula that is very combat heavy with extremely simple economy. The campaigns are excellent though and as long as the true randomness of attacks/defense doesn't drive you crazy it is a lot of fun. Very challenging and has real strategic and tactical depth as well as pretty well balanced.
I personally never did multiplayer but last I checked the multiplayer community was pretty healthy.
i played it, its fine, its a solid game. Easily can lose several hours in a session and probably played over 40 in total. Its enjoyable to play through due to the upgrading mechanics and wanting to see all the potential evolutions. That said, I'm not always a huge fan of the level design as you're often encouraged to play into negative fights (e.g. the timing for meeting the enemy aligns with their daytime bonuses) which forces you to play a bit more defensively than I'd like.
Same happened for me when I clicked on the link, I had to delete the cookies for wesnoth.org and then load the site again. I think their Anubis setup might be broken a bit
More like Heroes of Might and Magic. It's a turn-based strategy game where battles take place on a hex grid map. It's got full campaigns, lots of factions and units, resources to gather... it's one of my favorite OSS projects. Wesnoth has been in active development forever and is a real labor of love, as well as a showcase of collaborative game development.
Not really. This game uses a turn-based combat system with a hex grid. It's more like Sid Meier's Civilization, but with a drastically simplified economy and a strong focus on battles. It also has a Tolkein-esque fantasy theme instead of a real-life history theme.
If that sounds at all interesting, I suggest giving it a shot.
only missing point about this game is some of the real word parameters like moral,flanking etc. Maybe a real history mod would be amazing like ancient era or medieval ages.
Modern strategy games for leisure can be traced back to actual militaries or hardcore history buffs—systems that would try to model morale etc., often to a degree which, er, doesn't have mass-market appeal. :p
Highly suggest connecting with one of the lead developers, Charles Dang/Vultraz, if you have any C++ jobs in the USA.
He's been a developer on Wesnoth since 2012 but only graduated university in 2024. Unfortunately, it's been an absolutely brutal market for new graduates. Even if you're a maintainer on one of the most popular OSS C++ projects on GitHub.
I can't recommend him enough.
edit: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-dang-10994b1b4
Even with 5 (albeit small) linux kernel patches, 2 Firefox patches.. employers weren’t interested. I’ve stopped contributing to open source completely. I’m considering switching fields. It was interesting but these days I need some ROI, personally.
Thanks,our company is in the DC area so I just reached out with an offer to chat. Wesnoth is an incredible project, I can't believe he doesn't have a programming job.
I am very surprised if he can't find a job, as an American, in DC, with 12 years of C++ experience. Sure companies aren't great at assessing open source experience, but there is one area its easy to find a job as a dev: work that requires a clearance.
St. John’s college is a great place that draws a special type of young person, but its graduates are not very STEM-legible. As far as I know they still offer no choice of major & no hands-on classes — just the great books.
Of course that makes this person’s skill all the more impressive.
That is sad. Maintaining something like this really takes almost all the skills also needed for enterprise, or a dozen places.
That it doesn't get him instant hired is the sad part, what are we coming to.
> Unfortunately, it's been an absolutely brutal market for new graduates.
Furthermore, more and more companies are looking for "professional" devs using AI tools such as Claude Code. By "professional" I mean proficient in using those AI tools, not actual knowledge. And they don't even specify this in the job offer and you learn this during the interview.
I don't understand why you're downvoted. Many of my 2025 graduate friends are seeing this problem.
Unlimited token-based usage of Claude Code is not in the budget for many students and employees.
At the same time, companies are demanding experience with these tools.
This is stratifying the industry. I have many talented classmates that can only use free GitHub Copilot. They're likely being screened out in favour of rich classmates with $200/month Claude subs.
As a result, they'll be more likely to get low-paying jobs that don't provide access to top-tier AI tools and the effect will compound.
I think this'll be even worse as Claude phases out subsidies.
If $2000/month subscription to Claude for 4 years of university is the minimum required for a Big Tech job, this field is going to become law/finance levels of cliquey.
Nobody is talking about that because it's bad for both AI booster and skeptic narratives but it's happening.
My only gripe with the game is that healing doesn't give XP to the healing units. This means you need to place them in combat to level up instead of placing them behind the fighters like they are intended to be, and with them initially having low health they are very squishy. I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP and then getting them to attack, but it feels like going against their role.
> Frequently Proposed Ideas (FPIs)
> 7. Healing/leadership should give experience
> It is felt that allowing units to gain experience without risk would make leveling-up of such units inevitable. Further, one of the motivating examples of this is so that units such as shaman can have a hope to level up in multiplayer. It is pointed out that if the experience gains were high enough to allow shaman to level up in a single multiplayer game, then it would be trivial to gain the best type of healing unit in a campaign very quickly.
https://forums.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=34904#w0fpi7 (2011)
Other aspects of the game or mod-able, but such things as this I guess is against the grain enough to probably be difficult.
There's various ways around this (like capping amount of experience per level by source), but ain't game design fun?
It depends. Personally I think they should make alternatives more easy. For instance, under Options, for people to pick other ways to level up. Does not have to be 1000000 ways, just, say 3-5 ways in total, first one being the main default and only the main default is kept balanced, the rest can be unbalanced, just allowed per option as-is.
Isn't the strategy then to keep them behind the fighter units, wait until an enemy is 1 HP away from death, make the healer advance and make a kill, then put a fighter in front of them again?
I've enjoyed this, honestly. There's a whole short-term pain/long-term gain tradeoff to risking healers that adds more strategy to the campaign.
> I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP
In practice, I've found it difficult to get monsters to 1-2 HP since it often means not using your most powerful attacks. On harder difficulties I usually can't afford the opportunity cost.
Yeah I personally found this to be a big part of the tactical and strategic challenge. It reminded me a lot of Pokemon where you have a similar challenge, of slotting "exposure to fighting" into a limited action and HP budget.
Edit: Now that I think about it, most turn-based games have this mechanic. It's almost an idiomatic balance/design decision in gaming.
Compare to Dota where support heroes have acquired more and more opportunities for assist gold/XP, it does in some sense make the game "easier" for the support players, but then the game is harder in other ways because now the supports are all way more farmed and dangerous than in older versions. It's the difference between controlling an army of many units and having to manage them all, versus controlling one unit and needing to work together within a team.
Dota/League does this because each hero is controlled by a human, and humans don't like playing low-impact, low-wealth, low-exp supports.
An indirect compensation is that these units require less XP to advance, but I understand your concern too.
> I know you can kinda cheese it by reducing a monster to 1-2 HP and then getting them to attack, but it feels like going against their role.
This is a problem with the XP-per-kill system. Wesnoth could use a variant instead. I use the above strategy all the time to level the healers up.
Note that elven units have slow (their healers), which is very powerful in its own right for getting a kill on a unit. First slow, then deal damage with other units.
It's OSS, no?
It is, but making a change that doesn't mess up the balance of the game can be tricky.
I loved this game playing on an Arch Thinkpad in university with budget graphics capability.
The best part is being able to pin locations on the map for your teammates, so we were able to plot the adventures and battlegrounds of a goated unit by naming the pins "Ronant's Triumph," "Ronant's Revenge," "Ronant's Folly," and ultimately "Ronant's Last Stand." Great times with a few beers and the lads.
RIP Ronant, Wesnoth will never see another hero of your like again.
I played the heck out of this about a decade ago. It's an amazing game, and I'd love to return to it and see what has changed.
Same, i think It was on my first Linux OS. The good old days hehe
Same!
Same! Just downloaded the latest version for nostalgia’s sake.
A+! They even had an iOS version a while back: `https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-battle-for-wesnoth/id14507...` (this may be the "Mac" version, see: `https://www.reddit.com/r/wesnoth/comments/1pjkwbw/i_had_wesn...`).
If that's your jam then there's also a (non-open-source) "Hero's Hour" which tickles the old Heroes of Might and Magic stylings, works reasonably well on Xbox, where I've been doing most of my gaming lately.
As far as Open Source gaming success stories, I'd put this up there in the Top 5 for "Original IP and Concept" (if that makes sense). Just a stellar labor of love, worth giving it a shot to play!
Also on Steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/599390/Battle_for_Wesnoth...
Don't suppose you've played in the steamdeck? Curious how well it works there
Sweet! Does anyone have a list of high-quality open source games like this?
(Subjective interpretation, but something like, "I couldn't believe it's free, I would have paid for it anyway.")
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead: Like Dwarf Fortress but post-apocalyptic survival horror. Endless Sky: top-down space shooter inspired by Escape Velocity SuperTux: inspired by Super Mario SuperTuxKart: inspired by Mario Kart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_video_game... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games...
Well:
- Supertux2, it got recently revamped, the quality skyrocketed. Much better controls and artwork.
- Supetux Advance, this is really great too.
- Retux (More Wariolike than Mario)
- Nethack/Slashem. A Roguelike more bound to interaction/exploration/mechanics than combat, but Slashem makes combat crazy with the Doppleganger Monk, which is basically a Shonen Manga, the role. (Dragon Ball/Naruto depending on your age).
- DCSS. Basically, not Nethack/Slashem, much more combat oriented than the Slashem combinatorics playing with the Monk a la Jackie Chan, this is more like an ARPG made a Rogue.
- Frotz/Lectrote/Winfrotz/whatver Z Machine interpreter and "All Things Devour". Spiritwrak, too. Great libre text adventures and still enganing because of weird mechanics.
- Frozen Bubble
- OpenArena.
- FreeDoom, better compiled with Deutex on daily builds.
- FreeCiv.
- OpenTTD today can be standalone enough.
- Frozen Bubble
- Minetest+tons of subgames such as Glitch, Nodecore...
- OOlite
- Speed Dreams. If the controls are hard, try the arcade mode. If the controls are still hard, get SupertuxKart, pick some real life car from the addons and get all the SD tracks from the inline downloader, they are several.
If you like arena shooters, Xonotic is quite remarkable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xonotic
The Free Civ and Free Colonization games are good. Brogue, Nethack, DCSS are good if you like roguelikes. OpenMW is a totally open source reimplementation of Morrowind, so that might fit the bill.
I know it's a very niche domain, but I feel this way about Lizard.
My lizard is the lizard of website: https://rainwarrior.ca/lizard/
My lizard is the lizard of source: https://github.com/bbbradsmith/lizard_src_demo/
Luanti aka minetest
Widelands as a settler clone
OpenRCT2 is a reimplementation of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2.
Just like its cousing OpenTTD which is a reimplementation of Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon.
0ad https://play0ad.com/
My first reaction was exactly that; I can't believe it's free!
Grew up playing Wesnoth, still adore the game. There is a TON of third party content and a serious extended universe, too!
Could you name a few places to find 3rd party content?
It's under the "add-ons" menu in game. I would recommend playing the top-ranked campaigns. Some amazing stuff in there. I adore Legend of the Invincibles. Fun story, tons of new gameplay mechanics.
Last time I checked there was an option on the main menu to download user-made campaigns.
There's a "addons" browser in the game.
My kids and I have been playing this for about 20 years. It's worked on Linux, Mac and Windows and has never stopped working.
In the meantime so many other favorite games have disappeared or become obsolete.
There's no absolute reason great games can't be as immortal as chess. Maybe Wesnoth can be.
An absolute gem I came across randomly many years ago. Picked up Mewgenics and it left me wishing it had some mechanics from Wesnoth like faster animations (Mewgenics caps at 4x), undo action (at least if the action doesn't trigger any rng/damage behavior), skip enemy turns.
I only wish they added more campaigns into the official lore.
What is pretty cool is how long-living the project has been. I have seen many open source games die over the last 2 decades; some were quite cool. So wesnoth staying alive is pretty epic in itself.
I heard about this game many many times due to software developers showcasing it as an example of a good libre videogame. However, I don't know a single person who played it and I have never seen anyone recommending it for its gameplay.
It is a relatively simple formula that is very combat heavy with extremely simple economy. The campaigns are excellent though and as long as the true randomness of attacks/defense doesn't drive you crazy it is a lot of fun. Very challenging and has real strategic and tactical depth as well as pretty well balanced.
I personally never did multiplayer but last I checked the multiplayer community was pretty healthy.
That’s absurd. It is the only game I’ve ever played other than chess. Maybe it’s not popular with FPS gamers, but a lot of people don’t like FPS.
i played it, its fine, its a solid game. Easily can lose several hours in a session and probably played over 40 in total. Its enjoyable to play through due to the upgrading mechanics and wanting to see all the potential evolutions. That said, I'm not always a huge fan of the level design as you're often encouraged to play into negative fights (e.g. the timing for meeting the enemy aligns with their daytime bonuses) which forces you to play a bit more defensively than I'd like.
Blocked by Anubis? Just says "invalid response" with no explanation or instructions for how to fix it. Chrome on Android - not exactly niche.
Thanks for that.
Same happened for me when I clicked on the link, I had to delete the cookies for wesnoth.org and then load the site again. I think their Anubis setup might be broken a bit
I remember playing this a lot back in the Ubuntu 6 days.
I've been playing this for 10+ years :) it's one awesome game and the details for sprites and art direction is sweet.
I love this game. It is also fairly easy to tinker with the units if you are like me, that is a big win.
In high school I kept a USB drive full of portable apps. This was one of them. I can still recommend it.
Fond memories, playing this throughout my youth :')
What would need to happen that more players are available for online games?
So it's like HMM but the whole map is in battle mode?
Open Source Games are really underrated Gems
Interesting! Is this similar to Age of Empires?
0 A.D. https://play0ad.com/ is more similar to Age of Empires.
Not at all. That would be a game called 0ad.
More like Final Fantasy Tactics
think more hexbased, turnbased, terrain and dice roll mechanics with unit upgrades being extremely important.
More like Fire Emblem
More like Heroes of Might and Magic. It's a turn-based strategy game where battles take place on a hex grid map. It's got full campaigns, lots of factions and units, resources to gather... it's one of my favorite OSS projects. Wesnoth has been in active development forever and is a real labor of love, as well as a showcase of collaborative game development.
Not really. This game uses a turn-based combat system with a hex grid. It's more like Sid Meier's Civilization, but with a drastically simplified economy and a strong focus on battles. It also has a Tolkein-esque fantasy theme instead of a real-life history theme.
If that sounds at all interesting, I suggest giving it a shot.
Never heard of this game. Is it similar to Warcraft III?
It's turn based, the most similar game I've played is probably Fantasy General. Closer to Advance Wars or Fire Emblem than Warcraft.
No. Warcraft 3 ist real time strategy, Wesnoth is turn based strategy.
No. This is turn based, it doesn't play like any RTS game.
Not really. It's turn-based and hex-based.
only missing point about this game is some of the real word parameters like moral,flanking etc. Maybe a real history mod would be amazing like ancient era or medieval ages.
Modern strategy games for leisure can be traced back to actual militaries or hardcore history buffs—systems that would try to model morale etc., often to a degree which, er, doesn't have mass-market appeal. :p
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chainmail_(game)