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Title: Veridian Expanse Demo
slembcke 10 hours ago
Huh... I didn't realize GoL had forums again. I thought they got axed due to some UK child protection law a while back?

Anyway, I've been working on a game part time for a while. I've maintained open source libraries for gamedev for almost 20 years, made many smaller games, and worked on many games as a contractor, but this is maybe the first big game that I'm really proud to call mine. :)

Veridian Expanse is a sci-fi exploration/crafting game with twin stick shooter elements that's heavily inspired by games like Terraria and Subnautica. It's not done yet, this demo is a bit of an early access type of situation, but there's enough solid content for a few hours of fun.

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Since you all are fellow Linux users and like options, here are some to play it. :)

  • [Demo on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2137670) - easy to run on Steam Deck

  • [WASM based web demo](https://veridianexpanse.com/demo/) - no download required, but with minor quirks

  • [Full dev build on itch.io](https://howlingmoonsoftware.itch.io/veridian-expanse) - source code + binaries for Linux/Mac/Win (includes ARM binaries for Raspberry Pis)



It's written from scratch in C using a handful of libraries. I'm pretty proud of the game's lighting. Normal mapped sprites lit by hundreds of lights in every frame with soft shadows and reflections, all while running smoothly on something as simple as a Raspberry Pi.

Anyway, I'd love if people gave it a try. Also, I'm dying for someone to tell me they compiled it and played in on OpenBSD, or Haiku or something like that. It's a big part of why I wanted to release it with the source code available. :D
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Running into compiling errors:
source-code$ make -j DRIFT_SDL3=1
cc -std=gnu11 -0s -DNDEBUG -I . -I src -I ext/tracy/public -D_REENTRANT -I/usr/include/fribidi -I/usr/include/libdrm -I/usr/include/libdecor-0 -DDRIFT_SDL3  -c -o src/base/drift_app.o src/base/drift_app.c
make: cc: No such file or directory

I am pretty sure fribidi, libdrm and libdecor-0 are installed. Running ARM64 Debian 14 (Testing). Vulkan is not available, so I cannot run the rpi64 build.
slembcke 3 hours ago
Interesting, usually systems provide a 'cc' alias that is just mapped to the default C compiler. You can replace that with gcc or clang and it should work. It works on the 3 or 4 Linuxes I've tried it on, *BSD, and Haiku. I know there are a lot of ins and outs to making a very cross compatible makefile, but I kinda just labeled it as a "template" because it seems to work everywhere I tried, but I knew it wouldn't work everywhere. 🤷
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gcc was not installed, because I was setting up the system last week... compiled, thanks. I am not yet that experienced to see these hints myself. But now I could not run the game. Terminal prints:

Using SDL v3.4.8 -> src/base/drift_app.c:589
Loading additional gamepad mappings. -> src/base/drift_app.c:625
Disabling threads when rendering with OpenGL... Need to fix this. -> src/base/drift_app.c:637
DriftApp no threads -> src/base/drift_app.c:408
Aborted

Sounds like you have to fix that thread-issue? Device is running with GLES2 if that matters, but also tried to force (currently unsupported) GLES3 with same issue. Testing it on purpose not on my main PC, because tried to make it work on a special device as you wished.

Last edited by PlayingOnLinuxphone on 17 May 2026 at 6:11 pm UTC
slembcke 1 hour ago
What hardware are you running it on? It requires GL 3.3, GLES 3, or Vulkan 1.1 at a minimum. That should support most hardware from the last 15 years or so. Add DRIFT_VULKAN=1 to enable the Vulkan renderer, probably will require installing a vulkan dev package of some sort.

The "DriftApp no threads" should really say it's running on a single thread. Not really a bug, just a fallback because there isn't really a cross platform compatible way to do threaded GL rendering AFAIK.
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