As an official representative of LPC, I will state that there is absolutely no genre preference for the actual games. If you want to make a shooter or a sci-fi action game or an RTS or whatever else, go for it. Just use the art. :)
The reason we settled on one art style is because we wanted to create an extensive, stylistically-consistent set of graphics, which is something the FOSS world mostly lacks. Given the art entries we got, I think it's safe to say that we made the right decision. We realize that the tiles are generally suited towards 2D RPGs, but the intent is definitely not to push a certain type of game.
This is a known bug, and it's harmless, so what I'll say right now is don't worry about it. I'll try to fix it when I have time, but it's low priority right now due to LPC and work. :)
I appreciate you taking the time to report the bug, though.
This is a commonly requested feature, and I should take a moment to explain why we don't have it.
When I initially set up OGA, we had a set of fixed tags, like what you're asking for. They worked well for some things, but there were two big problems:
Some things don't fit neatly into a particular category, and were shoehorned into places they didn't fit very well, and
People constantly misunderstood what the tags referred to and miscategorized their art.
It kind of made a mess of the archive, and a lot of things weren't where they should be.
It would be nice to have someone go in and manually set up tag synonyms and such, but unfortunately that would require a very large amount of time that I just don't have. If someone would like to volunteer for this task, I would really appreciate it, but given the sheer number of tags we have, I doubt anyone will want to do it. Most likely some people will start, do a few hours of work, and give up. It's a long, unpleasant, and utterly thankless task, and we lack the funding to pay someone to do it.
The list of popular tags may be doable, so I'll see if I can make that happen. :)
I like that idea, although I think fundamentally the problem becomes a question of getting people to actually remember to enter it. That's always the biggest problem with metadata. :)
1. The submission stands alone. We recommend that people also submit their art to OGA so that they'll have ownership of it under their own accounts. Any art that's not submitted to OGA by the author will be submitted by me or one of the other contest admins. This won't affect your score either way. :)
2. If you want to put a preview in the text area and don't want to host it yourself, just submit the file along with the rest of your submission and link to it in the description.
3. The description and notes section will be read by judges, so there's no need to include a readme text if you'd prefer not to.
This is actually kind of a difficult topic. While there are plenty of people who are very quick to (rightly) point out that there's nothing stopping you from selling a FOSS game, it's worth noting that it's going to be a lot harder to make a profit if you're giving away the same thing that you're selling. The real answer, unfortunately, is to not give away quite everything.
There are a couple of ways you could do this:
Start out propietary and open source later. This seems to be the most common. If you release your game for free too early, though, you might risk angering your customers, unless you warn them ahead of time that it'll be open source fairly soon (that said, if you do that, you could lose out on some sales).
Keep the art proprietary. This is effective, but as someone who runs an art site for FOSS games, it's not the option that I would personally prefer. A lot of games that start out proprietary and eventually go FOSS (like the above) do this as well.
Keep the engine proprietary. You can always open up your art and media and keep your game engine proprietary. The down side here is that it's not really open source or free software. :)
Keep the 'glue' code proprietary. There aren't that many projects that do this, but I'd like to see it done. Sell your whole game, and also put the engine source code and the art files up for free download, but sell the 'script' code. Here, you have the advantage of creating buzz by encouraing people to make free 'fan' levels for your game, but you're still charging people for the full experience.
Kickstarter. If you want to release your game completely and immediately as open source, you're going to take a big sales hit, so you'd pretty much need to make all of your money on the Kikstarter campaign (probably $100k+), which is somewhat unrealistic for an unproven company. I'd love to see this work, but I doubt it's viable.
With all the thinking I've done on this subject, I'm pretty sure those are the only viable options I've come up with. The holy grail would be to get people to pay for a game that's compeltely free and open, but I have no idea how to go about doing that. :)
@surt
Yes, that bugs me too. I don't have a quick fix for it, but I'll try to code something when I get the chance.
As an official representative of LPC, I will state that there is absolutely no genre preference for the actual games. If you want to make a shooter or a sci-fi action game or an RTS or whatever else, go for it. Just use the art. :)
The reason we settled on one art style is because we wanted to create an extensive, stylistically-consistent set of graphics, which is something the FOSS world mostly lacks. Given the art entries we got, I think it's safe to say that we made the right decision. We realize that the tiles are generally suited towards 2D RPGs, but the intent is definitely not to push a certain type of game.
Bart
Yeah, I know.
This is a known bug, and it's harmless, so what I'll say right now is don't worry about it. I'll try to fix it when I have time, but it's low priority right now due to LPC and work. :)
I appreciate you taking the time to report the bug, though.
Bart
Hi!
This is a commonly requested feature, and I should take a moment to explain why we don't have it.
When I initially set up OGA, we had a set of fixed tags, like what you're asking for. They worked well for some things, but there were two big problems:
It kind of made a mess of the archive, and a lot of things weren't where they should be.
It would be nice to have someone go in and manually set up tag synonyms and such, but unfortunately that would require a very large amount of time that I just don't have. If someone would like to volunteer for this task, I would really appreciate it, but given the sheer number of tags we have, I doubt anyone will want to do it. Most likely some people will start, do a few hours of work, and give up. It's a long, unpleasant, and utterly thankless task, and we lack the funding to pay someone to do it.
The list of popular tags may be doable, so I'll see if I can make that happen. :)
Bart
I like that idea, although I think fundamentally the problem becomes a question of getting people to actually remember to enter it. That's always the biggest problem with metadata. :)
Thanks for the heads up. I'll talk to Botanic about it.
1. The submission stands alone. We recommend that people also submit their art to OGA so that they'll have ownership of it under their own accounts. Any art that's not submitted to OGA by the author will be submitted by me or one of the other contest admins. This won't affect your score either way. :)
2. If you want to put a preview in the text area and don't want to host it yourself, just submit the file along with the rest of your submission and link to it in the description.
3. The description and notes section will be read by judges, so there's no need to include a readme text if you'd prefer not to.
4. Yes. :)
Is the BSOD really a copyright issue?
I ask because xscreensaver has been part of most Linux distros forever, and it's got that fake BSOD screensaver that has exactly the same stuff.
Greets!
This is actually kind of a difficult topic. While there are plenty of people who are very quick to (rightly) point out that there's nothing stopping you from selling a FOSS game, it's worth noting that it's going to be a lot harder to make a profit if you're giving away the same thing that you're selling. The real answer, unfortunately, is to not give away quite everything.
There are a couple of ways you could do this:
With all the thinking I've done on this subject, I'm pretty sure those are the only viable options I've come up with. The holy grail would be to get people to pay for a game that's compeltely free and open, but I have no idea how to go about doing that. :)
Bart
Go here:
http://www.gimp.org/
Then download GIMP and save the individual layers.
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