Rising Thunder developer to release source code for cancelled free-to-play fighting game

Announced in mid-2015, Rising Thunder was pitched as an online-only, PC-exclusive free-to-play fighting game from Seth Killian's Radiant Entertainment. Radiant was then taken over by Riot in March of last year, which led to the permanent closure of Rising Thunder following a short-live alpha phase. Now, Rising Thunder will be handed over to its players, with a Community Edition due next month.

In a post featured on the game's subreddit, Radiant acknowledged an overarching desire to keep the fight 'em up alive.

"[We're] super inspired by your efforts to bring back the game. We'd like to pitch in with a little help," so reads the post. "So here's what we're doing, all coming this January. We're calling it 'Rising Thunder: Community Edition.' Our intent here is to give the game back to you guys, the community, and let you run with it."

With that, Radiant will release Rising Thunder's source code, offering players an open source version of the game's server.

"The original RT server is somewhat of a beast, segmented into a bunch of different services that aren't particularly easy to deploy or maintain," the post adds. "So instead we've whipped up a first pass at a bare-bones server that will allow you to play online with rudimentary matchmaking and limited features. And we're making it open source so that if you're inclined you can tinker and improve it."

Radiant says it's also tinkered with the game's final build, and has added offline local play as well as a number of quality of life improvements. Local play will support keyboard and controller only, so says the developer, before warning players not to expect new characters or systems on top of what was in place before servers were shuttered last year.

"All of this is free, and will stay that way forever," Radiant adds. "In the meantime, our team has moved on to develop something new and we'll share that with you when the time is right."