Amnesia: The Dark Descent is now open source

In the run-up to the release of Amnesia: Rebirth, Frictional Games are continuing to show love to their first Amnesia game for its tenth anniversary. Paying tribute to the modding community that's played no small part in Amnesia's longevity, Frictional have now released the source code for Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs freely online.

"It feels like we could have released this source code a long time ago," they say in their announcement post. "Unfortunately there has always been something else we had to attend to instead. But now that Amnesia: The Dark Descent has had its tenth anniversary and Amnesia: Rebirth is less than a month away, we just couldn’t wait any longer!"

You can find TDD's source code on GitHub here and AMFP's here.

As Frictional note, this doesn't mean the game itself is now free. It's just the source code is now freely available for fans and modders to poke around in. Throughout the years, there have been tons of custom stories and other creative mods for TDD, and Frictional say they're eager to see what modders can create with even more information about Amnesia at their disposal.

"One of my favourite examples still, is someone making Tetris in Dark Descent (which you can find here!)," says studio co-founder Thomas Grip in an interview with modding hub ModDB. "Which was a fairly early mod in which they trapped the player inside a room with the controls. I’m not even sure how they did some of the camera stuff, it was really crazy. Just the sheer ingenuity of it, it was just amazing how modders were able to do things we never planned to do as a team."

Back in their official announcement, Frictional add, "I also hope this release can be of help to anyone wanting to create their own engine or just wanting to learn more about game programming. While the code is not the greatest in places and the tech used is not the latest, it is a fully contained game engine in a fairly easy-to-understand package."

Frictional list out some of the tech features in TDD's engine in the announcement, for those of you who are curious, and they also recently released some old design documentation and details about Amnesia: The Dark Descent's development - including the fact that it may have at one point included trampolines and Jesus for some reason.

Frictional's next game, Amnesia: Rebirth is launching on October 20th.