Cart Life exits Steam, goes open source

Want to play a game about the tumultuous life of a street shop vendor?

Want to play a game about the tumultuous life of a street shop vendor? Well, you can't right now, as the websitehosting it is currently drowning under heavy bandwidth load. But when it returns, you'll find Cart Life, the indie small business simulation from Richard Hofmeier, available free of charge and completely open source for tinkerers to slot in custom characters and stall types.

Cart Life's been around since 2011, and its fantastic writing, mundane-but-not-really presentation, and neat animations collected a bunch of IGF awards(included the coveted Nuovo award for all-around weirdness) and a definite thumbs-up from us.

Hofmeier decided to pull Cart Life from Steam and host its code for free on his website as a sign of finality to his bug-fixing support for the game. "I'm done supporting it/fixing bugs," he tweeted. "Time to stop charging & open it up (despite fears of code nakedness)."

You can grab Cart Life and its digital guts on Hofmeier's websiteas soon as it returns. I'm hoping for a Papers, Please crossover of Cart Life in Arstotzka myself.