Open Surge: retro game engine

Open Surge is two things in one app: an open-source engine for 2D retro platform games, by the Brazilian developer Alexandre Martins and contributors, and Surge the Rabbit, the game made with it. The project describes the game as made “in the spirit of classic 16-bit Sonic platformers of the 1990s”: fast running, slopes and loops, and a score, time and power display. The characters, levels, graphics and music are its own, all under free licences (see below).

The game

• Waterworks Zone, three acts, the third ending with a boss fight against a salamander.
• After the end of the demo, two tutorial levels show how to make your own levels.
• Then, if you like, the classic levels: three acts of Sunshine Paradise and three of the older Waterworks Zone.
• The engine has 360-degree physics, so characters run along walls and through loops, and since version 0.6.1.2 a Team Play mechanic.

Making levels and playing mods

The level editor is built into the game: pause, drag the handle at the bottom of the screen and enter Debug Mode to change the level you are in. Behaviour is written in SurgeScript, the engine’s own scripting language, documented at docs.opensurge2d.org. The project’s advice is to create games on a computer and play them anywhere.

Games and mods made by others load from a .zip file or a folder in the options (see the questions below). The engine’s website collects community games.

Controls

On phones, an on-screen gamepad with adjustable opacity; on TVs it is hidden by default and you need a controller. Version 0.6.1.3 detects controller layouts automatically. The game runs in landscape.

The art and music are free to reuse

The engine keeps a licence list for every graphic, sound, font and level it ships. In the version here, all are under free licences: mostly Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 3.0 and 4.0), plus CC BY-SA, CC0 public domain, MIT, the SIL Open Font License, Apache-2.0 and Allegro’s Giftware licence. None is for non-commercial use only. The music is by Johan Brodd, Alexandre Almeida and others; some art and sounds come from OpenGameArt and Freesound. We found no material from Sega’s games in it: the game borrows a style, not characters.

What goes online

Nothing. The app has no internet permission and no network code. Menu items such as “Visit Open Surge on the web”, “Donate” or “Rate the app” open pages in your browser, adding the engine version, your language and the current level to the address; on TVs they don’t open at all. The privacy policy: “The Application does not collect personal data automatically.”

Its only permission is reading storage on Android 12 and older, presumably for loading mods from a folder or a .zip file.

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s build of version 6.1.3.0, with engine version 0.6.1.3 from January 2026, signed with F-Droid’s key. The developer’s own APK on GitHub uses a different package name, so the two install side by side and neither updates the other. Open Surge isn’t on Google Play.
• 0.6.1.3 came 17 months after the previous release. Besides the controller detection, it reworked the audio system and the underwater sound effects, redesigned the level editor’s grid, added Ukrainian and Lithuanian, and supports the 16-kilobyte memory pages of newer 64-bit devices.
• The 45.1 MB file is for ARM phones and TVs, 32- and 64-bit, not x86, and needs Android 5.0 or later. Our scan found no trackers.
• The screenshots are the project’s own, from June 2024, showing the game’s own art.
• The engine is licensed under the GPL-3.0 or later, and SurgeScript under Apache-2.0. F-Droid’s source archive contains only the Android build scripts, which download the rest; the engine’s source for this version is at https://github.com/alemart/opensurge/tree/v0.6.1.3.

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

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