FLARE

FLARE, the Free/Libre Action Roleplaying Engine, is in its README’s words “a simple game engine built to handle a very specific kind of game: single-player 2D action RPGs.” Its game, the Empyrean Campaign, has been complete since version 1.0 in 2018: you are exiled from your homeland of Empyrean and fight your way back, as a Brute, Scout or Adept. The game’s own description says its gameplay “can be likened to the games in the Diablo series.” The project was started by Clint Bellanger; most of the work today is done by Justin Jacobs, who wrote the 1.15 announcement.

The app doesn’t include the game

This is the important part. The Android app is the engine only: there is no game data in the APK. The project’s Android guide says so directly: “the game data must be manually installed.” Until you do, the app shows “Flare game data needs to be installed. Visit the wiki page for download & instructions?” and closes.

1. On the project’s GitHub releases, download the Windows version of Flare 1.15; the guide names a 613-megabyte zip. Use the official download only: in 2022 someone swapped the guide’s link for a malicious one, and editing the guide has been locked down since.
2. Extract it and find its mods folder: default, fantasycore, empyrean_campaign and a mods.txt file, about 650 megabytes in all by our count.
3. Copy the contents of that mods folder into Flare/mods on the phone’s internal storage, the folder the app creates on first start once you allow storage access. Copying the whole extracted folder puts the files one level too deep: that was the problem in a user’s report on the issue tracker, and the developer’s fix was to move the contents up into Flare/mods.
4. Start FLARE. If pressing Play says “Enable a core mod to continue”, open Mods and enable fantasycore and empyrean_campaign; the game’s README also says to enable them in the Configuration screen. From the code, we expect this step on a fresh install, because the app reads its list of active mods from the config folder, not from the copied mods.txt.

Saves and settings normally go into the same Flare folder (Flare/saves and Flare/config), so they most likely stay on the phone if you uninstall the app. Only if that folder can’t be created does the app fall back to its private folder under Android/data.

Playing on a phone

• Touch controls are on by default on phones: a virtual stick and two action buttons. This build loads those mobile defaults on first start; older versions needed a reset in the settings.
• Game controllers, keyboards and mice work too, since version 1.15.
• It plays in landscape only.
• New in 1.15, from the announcement: remastered graphics, a new side dungeon, the Iron Labyrinth, which scales to your level, new Mastite items with random stats, and three new powers in each power tree.

The game contains violence and blood; the README warns of “depictions of violence, blood, and mild gore.”

Permissions and storage

FLARE asks for storage access when it starts, so that it can read the game data and write saves in the Flare folder, and closes if you refuse. Its manifest also lists All files access, but the code never asks you for it. It has no internet permission. Because it targets Android 10, recent Android versions may show a warning that it “was built for an older version of Android”; the developer keeps that target so the data folder stays easy to reach (see the questions below).

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s build of version 1.15, compiled from the project’s source code, including six commits of Android fixes made after the 1.15 release, and signed with F-Droid’s key. Because of those fixes, the engine reports itself as version 1.15.04. The project also publishes its own engine APK on GitHub, signed by the developer; the two can’t update each other without uninstalling first.
• The 10.9 MB file runs on ARM and x86, 32- and 64-bit. Our scan found no trackers.
• The screenshots, from the project’s listing, show an Android build of version 1.14 with the game data installed, before the 1.15 remaster changed the art.
• The engine is licensed under the GPL-3.0 or later; the game’s art and data are under CC BY-SA 3.0.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one.