Wazzal (dx8 game) open sourced!

Wazzal in space

Wazzal is a single-player role-playing space trading and combat game that features a compact plot, ship-boarding mini-fights and allows to switch control between ships during team battles.


The recently open sourced game was made by Ville Mönkkönen of Instant Kingdom (IK). He is responsible for excellent freeware games including Notrium and is currently working on a for-pay top-down fantasy RPG.


IK community member Amarth shared some insight about what it would take to make Wazzal run on modern operating systems:

It will be a lot of work. DirectX calls (Windows only) are sprinkled all around the code. Then there are some references to the win32 api, though not many when compared with the DX ones. There are probably also some non-standard C++ Visual Studio-only things going on, but that shouldn't be too hard to fix either. DirectX is the big problem here.It also needs to be done, because Wazzal is written with the DirectX 8 library, which seems to be no longer supported in any way by Microsoft.

It's positively impossible to find the headers and libraries needed to compile this at Microsoft. I haven't tried other locations yet. It's probably not impossible to find, but who knows how well supported old libraries will be on newer versions of Windows...

The license for both code and assets is a very permissive one and likely to be compatible with MIT/zlib/3-BSD (and CC-BY for assets):

10 You are allowed to use the game source files and the included resource files in any way you wish, I only ask that you retain this license and credit me.