Games, FOSS, and a Bit of Physics

Games sit at the intersection of programming and creative work. This talk looks at game development from a practical point of view, focusing on how tools, workflows, and platform realities decide what actually gets used in real projects.

The first part of talk looks at the game development tool landscape and the gap between the large number of open source engines and libraries available and the fact that proprietary tools are still widely used in professional production. Instead of comparing features, this section focuses on workflows, team scale, portability, and long term maintenance.

This part also gives an overview of why FOSS game engines and tools are still not widely adopted, even by many indie studios that could benefit from them. The reasons go beyond technical features and are closely tied to how ecosystems are built. Blender is used as a comparision to understand how it managed to break into the industry and compete with established standards, and why game engines have a harder time following the same path. The talk also touches on whether industry recognition actually matters for the future and sustainability of FOSS engines, and what role the community can play in improving adoption.

The next section looks at Linux gaming as an example of how these decisions and choice of game engine affect platforms and players. Despite efforts from the Linux community and companies like Valve, native Linux releases are still rare. This part discusses why Linux gaming is still not mainstream, even though modern game engines make it relatively easy to export games to Linux.

In the final part, the talk uses game physics as a technical example. It briefly discusses how physics libraries like Jolt Physics are used in real games and integrated into engines like Godot. To keep things approachable, this section then demos a simple toy physics engine to show how physics can be intuitive and fun when seen visually rather than through equations.

The goal of this talk is to share perspective around FOSS advocacy in game development and to encourage people to experiment and build using open source game development tools.

• Why many open-source game tools exist but only a few see wide adoption

• How workflows and ecosystem design affect engine and tool choices

• How developer decisions impact gaming platforms like Linux

• How FOSS components can and do get used in real engines

• How small experiments and demos are a good way to learn and contribute